QGIS » QGIS Application

Beginning from version 1.10 GDAL has an OSM driver which converts OpenStreetMap data into traditional GIS layers and OGC Simple Features http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_osm.html

GDAL OSM driver finds up to five GIS layers from OSM data. The schemata of the resulting layers are controlled with "osmconf.ini" configuration file. Because of the nature of OSM data and GDAL OSM driver it is usually not most practical to read the layers which are advertised by GDAL as is. For better usability users should be provided with an "Read OSM data" wizard. With the wizard users could select a subset of OSM data by building a SQL clause which would be passed on to the GDAL OSM driver. For more standard SQL it would be better to use the SQLite dialect instead of the native SQL dialect of GDAL/OGR.

It would be good to make the wizard so that it could be used also as a GDAL osm configuration editor so that users could edit a list of OSM tags which will be converted into normal attributes in the GIS layer schema. By default this is done by hand editing "osmconf.ini" file but other config files can be used if the alternative file path is given with GDAL config option "OSM_CONFIG_FILE".