Digital maps for railway applications based on OpenStreetMap data

Digital maps are used for various applications in railways, such as positioning and map-matching, asset management for maintenance, fleet management or traveller information. While most of these applications still consider official map databases generated within surveying campaigns of land surveying offices or engineering surveying companies, the crowd-based mapping of infrastructure known as volunteered geographic information (VGI) becomes more and more interesting. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is probably the biggest and best known VGI approach providing a free and open-source database for geodata worldwide outperforming conventional mapping procedures in terms of actuality and costs. For making the growing geo database accessible for everybody, its structure is kept as simple as possible. The purpose of this paper is to present a proposed extension to the classic OSM data model, which allows for modelling many aspects needed by several railway applications. Thus, railway applications can access information from the world's biggest free geospatial database.