[Iraq] Need help with data export

Hey all,

I am working for humanitarian response in Iraq for Syrian refugees and Iraqi IDPs. For long time information management units struggle to get up to date bilingual dataset with settlements for Iraq. That would facilitate a LOT humanitarian response in all sectors. Current COD from OCHA, used for last months, is based on old digitized maps and is far away from ideal, only English and in a lot of cases not correct.

Since June I went across a lot of datasets and visits in the fiels, and can say that OSM data for cities, towns, villages and localities seems to be the most comprehensive dataset for Iraq. However I struggle to find a way to export data as bilingual (English and Arabic). Ideally would need in csv or shp to be able to share with IMOs. Could anyone give me a hand with this?

Many many thanks!

The Overpass service let’s extract these places.

The simplest way is to produce a shp file directly from the free Quantum GIS software using the Quick OSM plugin.

In the left panel of Quick Osm, you select query and provide the following query.

/* iraq boundary relation=304934*/
[out:xml];
node(area:3600304934)[place];
out meta;

Note that there are nearly 42,000 places for Irak. Some places like the capital are translated in a multitude of languages. This adds a great number of variables. You will have the possibility to select the usefull variables for you.