Talk:GDF

is there any free (speech, but beer would be interesting anyhow) software that uses this? i.e. any practical benefit to the community if a converter from osm->gdf were written? Morwen 12:48, 15 June 2007 (BST)

• As I understand it there isn't any interesting proprietary software or hardware which will read GDF either. If implementing GDF output from OSM would quickly lead to usable maps for car navigation systems that would be great. But although the GDF interchange format is standardised it's quite verbose and ASCII orientated. So each manufacturer has a proprietary compression scheme which is not open. This page provides a lot more info and history of this (particularly the section lower down by user "Attila Sandor Fiko"). It should be noted that there is a later format called SDAL which does specify the on-disc format and has relatively available specs but support for this is limited - Njd27 16:57, 16 October 2007 (BST)

Switching to GDF

I don't think there is any way that OSM can switch to GDF as it's data storage. What we probably can do is:

* Try to make tags that have similar functions and names, making a OSM -> GDF converter relatively simple to write, and making it easy for people familiar with GDF to contribute to OSM.
* Look at anything in GDF that we can't represent, and figure out how we can implement them - e.g. with Advanced Relationships

An OSM -> GDF converter may be a useful to people who want to load OSM data into existing systems that are used to taking GDF.

GDF converter progress

Has there been any progress in this field of developing a converter ?

I've started developing an OSM to GDF converter. --Timkoers (talk) 19:18, 23 May 2022 (UTC)