For a project I'm working on, I started to play around with the OpenStreetMap data as a source for locations (from a guy who's never used GIS info systems), so I think I'd be a good insight into getting started with using this great resource.
Notes:
- I develop in Java mostly, but I have a generally well rounded skill set.
Firstly, I had to make the jump to Postgress and PostGIS, which are annoying to setup if you're not familiar with them. I had a MySQL instance running, but for the life of me, I couldn't get osmosis to import before getting the setup just right, which unfortunately wasnt' as simple and stright forward as I'd have liked to see in any docs. So after finally banging PostGIS over the head enough to accept the import, I was hit with a huge knowledge gap on how to actually access spatial and hstore based data. Admittedly, once you get the handle of them, the SQL access the data is quite expressive and powerful.
For DB imports, I used Osmosis for data import. I couldn't find any stand-alone Java based libaries for actually using the DB data which would help a lot (maybe I'll end up writing an open source one if it doesn't already exist). So, I basically dropped down to writing PostGIS based SQL queries, which is really quite expressive and well structured when the data is good (depends on the world region, mostly good for North America from what I found so far).
Secondly, there was the OpenStreetMap data itself. As someone who primarily wants to work on geographic barriers and political boundaries, there's a big disconnect between the polygons of the system and the political ones. Generally, there's always a node (think of a pin on a map) to represent a proper place name (New york city for instance) and a polygon that encompass what New York's political boundaries are, but quite often there won't be explicit ties between the two, so you're left with bridging the two yourself constructing queries for where nodes are within city / state / country / etc.. Anyways, thats as far as I've gotten so far, so good luck!
Some links that helped me:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs...
http://postgis.net/docs/manual...
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/... (Make sure to read carefully, becase its rather unforgiving and terse about bad environment setups)