Since March the OSMData Service has been running on new servers sponsored by FOSSGIS e.V. I wrote about the switch in an earlier blog post. Now, half a year later, I want to write about my experiences with the new setup.

For many year now I have been running a service at <a openstreetmapdata.com, first alone and then with the help of Christoph Hormann. We offered processed OSM data for download, most importantly coastline and Antarctic icesheet data. And although the service was always free to use and the software mostly Open Source, this was always our show. For a long time I wanted to change this and turn this into a proper OSM community project, and, finally, we have taken a big step towards that.

Three years ago I launched the OpenStreetMapData.com [Update: Discontinued June 2019, some data now available from osmdata.openstreetmap.de]. web site to host the OSM coastline data extracts I was generating. Since then I have been updating those extracts at least daily and offering them for download on that site. The coastline extracts are used in many OSM maps including the OSM standard style.

In the last months I have spent a lot of my spare time working on the OSMCoastline program mentioned several times in this blog already. It is by no means perfect yet, but it works and several people have tried it and used its output. But it is not the easiest program to use with all its options and you need a current planet file to work from, not everybody has one lying around. So I thought about how to make access to its output easier for everybody.