Question

Hi I have a been set an assignment in university for which i have to use datasets with longitude and latitude data in but im struggling to find some so far i have looked at

http://www.geonames.org/export/

this website offers it but not in a efficient way to read,

http://www.police.uk/data

but the csv forms they offer are proving very hard to import into a mysql database

and the last site is

http://linkeddata.org/data-sets

which doesnt seem to contain any datasets with longitude and latitude data,

i was wondering if anyone had any ideas of where i could find datasets that meet the criteria that i am looking for and are also free.

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

Take a look at http://www.openstreetmap.org. Just select region you like, click export tab, and export it as an XML, which will contain geographical data as points with lat/lon and ways which reference them to form roads, building and other geographical objects. Export doesn’t allow you to download too large areas, so if you need these you may download whole countries or a whole planet (which is 18GB compressed). See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Dumps.

Alternatively, you may download some GPS tracks using corresponding tab. These will as well contain lat/lon data in XML format.