For the past two years, I’ve been mostly mapping some of the rural areas in Karnataka, mainly connecting village roads/major district roads to State/National Highways. Thanks to some of the experienced mappers like docaneesh, indigomc and others who have been mapping this region since the inception when the entire region was blank, Karnataka, now has a fairly mapped road network in India OSM.

This can’t happen overnight and its interesting to see how this is being done over time by the OSM community. Below is a simple animated GIF that I created using Mapolution showing the evolution of OSM Map(only roads) in Karnataka.

If you’re interested to create a simple animation like the above one and if you’re on Ubuntu GNU/Linux, here’s the small how-to:

• Mapolution uses Libosmium library, Gdal and its dependencies. Get them all by running-
  sudo apt-get install git cmake cmake-curses-gui make libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler libosmpbf-dev libexpat1-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libsparsehash-dev libboost-dev libboost-program-options-dev libgdal1-dev libgeos++-dev libproj-dev doxygen graphviz libgdal-dev gdal-bin libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-program-options-dev osmctools

• Build and compile the Mapolution binary -
  git clone https://github.com/osmcode/libosmium
git clone https://github.com/osmcode/osmium-contrib
cd osmium-contrib/mapolution
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

• Get the OSM full history dump extract from here. Make sure the area isn’t too large and extract smaller area using Osmconvert/osmosis if necessary. For example, this will extract Karnataka from India OSM history dump -
  osmconvert india.osh.pbf -B=karnataka.poly -o=karnataka.osh.pbf
  where karnataka.poly can be downloaded from http://polygons.openstreetmap.fr/ by providing the relation id of Karnataka.

• Run the Mapolution with the OSM history file to get the animation -
  ./mapolution -S 120 karnataka.osh.pbf
./rasterize.sh

This will create shapefiles in out directory for every 4 months(120days) and save the animated gif in a file called anim.gif with the result. And to add month-year to the gif, you can edit it in Gimp.

Thanks to Jochen Topf for helping out with an issue while running the Mapolution.