Point to Polygone

Hello experts,

I encounter one basic problem. I have been digitalising the building in Shufat refugee area using polygone.

Extent:
Latitude: From 31.7953447643 To 31.8245615267
Longtitude: From 35.2210850639 To 35.2870514556.

But After exporting this area into QGIS or downloading the data directly in QGIS, this area only contains numerous points, not polygones.

Did I do something wrong on the OSM, when I was digitalising the buildings? But it looks fine on the OSM website.

Thank you for reading this post.

Maybe anyone of you can help me. Thanks.

So you are referring to this area?
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/31.8094/35.2532

And tell us please how you have imported that OSM data into QGIS in detail.

What QGIS version?

Hello Stephan,

thank you very very much for the reply and sorry for my late response.

Yes, I am referring to this area that you pointed.

Here is my process

I clicked on the ‘export’ tab in the OpenStreetMap;
‘export’

Then, a file called ‘map.osm’ was downloaded.

I opened Quantum GIS 1.8.0-Lisboa;
Clicked ‘open OSM from file’;

OpenStreetMap file to load: map.osm
Add columns for tags: [v] name; [v]place; [v]landuse;
[v] use custom renderer: small scale.

Then, I got dots in QGIS.
Here is the screen shot:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/swcm8ms2dpx1dvm/2016-01-25.png?dl=0

The area and the layout looked fine. But four dots should form a polygone.

So, I tried a second way.

I opened a new page in Quantum GIS 1.8.0-Lisboa;
Clicked ‘Download OSM data’.
I put in the above listed extend.

Then, I got dots in QGIS again.

unfortunately I am not so familiar with QGIS that I can give you a concrete solution or hint about an error in your workflow.

But:
Is there any reason why you have a quite old QGIS version in use? Using a more recent version can solve some errors, maybe.
then,
are you aware of importing raw OSM data via the QuickOSM plugin? Did you ever used that inside QGIS?

Maybe it is a matter of missing or wrong map paint style?

Due to lack of time I cannot try to reproduce your workflow, but maybe via a general web search about “import OSM data QGIS” you can find some hints,

or do some research via http://gis.stackexchange.com wheremayn QGIS users are active.

Keep in mind that OSM data format isn’t like all the formats GIS packages are familiar with (eg. shapefile).
There are nodes, ways and (few) relations. The only means to tell that a way is a polygon vs a line is to (besides requirement of being closed) check tagging.
When you import into QGIS you have to define a layer. Like: “import all closed lines with building=* tag to an area type layer, and import some keys into attribute table columns”. You see dots because you didn’t define what you want and it just imported all the nodes into point type layer.

Hello Stephan and Rico,

I actually also have ArcGIS 10, so I downloaded ‘Openstreetmap toolbox’ for ArcGIS 10 and follow this video:

Openstreetmap into ArcGIS 10.1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3XXkGRSjrw

And it works well.

Thank you very much again for the reply. :slight_smile: