OpenStreetMap is a free and editable map of the world created and maintained by volunteers. It has important features such as roads, places of interest, country borders, and ports. It is released with an open-content license, so it is free to use.

Geographic data was compiled from many sources, including the public submission of GPS traces. The following screenshot shows an example of the level of detail available and some of the volunteer submission of GPS traces:

Planet.osm is all of the OpenStreetMap features in one file. The file in total is about 750 GB when uncompressed, so it is a mouthful. You can also download files for individual countries or continents (called extracts).

Information on the planet.osm file and download locations is located on the OpenStreetMap wiki site (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm). There are two file format options, PBF or compressed OSM XML. PBF is a binary format. It is smaller, so it is faster to download and process. OpenStreetMap recommends using it when possible.

You will need GIS tools to open and process the data. These will be discussed in a later chapter. Having a full dataset with details about roads (name and type of road for example) and points of interest (restaurant or gas station for example) can be especially useful for transportation-related IoT data. Incorporating a full-scale dataset into your Hadoop environment, for instance, allows you to operate geospatial analytics at scale.