get open street map in R

Question

Hello,

I am trying to load up a norway map using 'osm' within R,

myLocation <- c(lon = 17.468946, lat = 66.87202)
myMap <- get_map(location=myLocation,source="osm", color='bw')
ggmap(myMap)

I am getting error saying service unavailable-

Map from URL : http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=66.87202,17.468946&zoom=10&size=640x640&maptype=terrain&sensor=false Error: map grabbing failed - see details in ?get_openstreetmap. In addition: Warning message: In download.file(url, destfile = destfile, quiet = !messaging, mode = "wb") : cannot open: HTTP status was '503 Service Unavailable'

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You don't say but this looks like the ggmap package (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggmap/ggmap.pdf) which appears to use the Export function of the OSM API to provide a raster image . The latter hardly ever works because it is very resource intensive and it rarely gets cycles because of the standard load on tile servers.

Additionally if this ever became heavily used it might be seen as a tile scraping application (see the get_cloudmade and get_stamen function documentation) which is contarary to OSM's Terms of Service.

In summary this is probably not working because it is using part of the OSM API which rarely functions for performance/load balancing reasons.

For vector data in R, the osmar package is probably the best choice.

Answer 2

ggmap package seems buggy. Why ask to google API for retrieving osm tiles? Maybe you may try the package 'OpenStreetMap': http://blog.fellstat.com/?cat=15 I've tested it, and it works fine.

get open street map in R

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