ISRO sees utility of openstreetmap data

While poking around Bhuvan – India’s hyped google earth competitor by ISRO, the country’s space agency, I happened to stumble upon a new WMS layer feature (link, see top right). Curious, i managed to extract the getcapabilities url using firebug (bhuvan wms getcapabilities) and used Qgis to connect to the server. The response had me pleasantly surprised.

The national highway and hospital data layers were actually made using openstreetmap data!To confirm, I compared the osm road vectors to the wms tiles and they match perfectly, and for many stretches osm now has more accurate data than what ISRO used when they created the layers.

Its strange that the national space agency would use data from the openstreetmap project rather than from the national mapping agency – Survey of India. Further proof that opengeodata is useful?

PS: The highlighted road is part of the Chennai port – Maduravoyal expressway under construction in Chennai. That road was marked by me and you would only find it in osm (link), nowhere else. The black lines are the roads from bhuvan.

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