Does anyone ignore what is OSM (OpenStreetMap)? If anyone was distracted, OpenStreetMap is the most important participative project to create free and editable maps  worldwide.

Following step by step what has been described in the posts “gvSIG 2.0: Create symbols libraries” we have created a new symbols library for our gvSIG form symbols related to OSM. Availability of this library has to be framed  in the idea that gvSIG users can use a wide and differentiated symbols library sets, that can be installed through the “Add-ons manager”.

See how this library has been realised in order to be a new example for users who wish to create an own library.

For point symbols (markers), a collection made by “SJJB Management” under Creative Commons (CC-0) licence and called “SJJB SVG Map Icons” has been used.  It is an excellent categorized symbols collection that can be downloaded in SVG format. Some of these icons come from the “US National Park Service Cartography” and other source of public domain that can be browsed on SJJB website.

As stated in previous posts, the name assigned by gvSIG to each symbol is the file name, thus we have used  a massive file renaming tool to perform this task; in our example we have used pyRenamer, available for Linux. Using Inkscape we have produced the different symbols when selected (colouring in yellow each symbol and adding the suffix “_sel” to file name).

Everything is ready now for the gvSIG symbols loader as already seen in a previous post and the new library is created in an automatic way and with the point symbols set loaded. In this case we have decided to create some subfolders to classify the sets of symbols.

We want that this library have also lines and polygons symbols similar to the ones we can found in OSM. Even if no documentation on symbols composition is available, it is possible with any image editor, such GIMP, to identify the symbols RGB values and replicate them in gvSIG.

We have created also line symbols

and polygon symbols

Only the package creation is left and “how to do it”  is explained in this post.

This package is available in the add-ons managers (selecting  http://downloads.gvsig.org/download/gvsig-desktop/ and looking for it in “Categories/simbology”) or directly downloading from here.