Italy/DBSN
DBSN (DataBase di Sintesi Nazionale, "National Summary Database") is a geographic dataset released by IGM (Istituto Geografico Militare, "Italian Military Geographic Institute") containing the most significative territorial informations for thematical analysis and visualizations for Italy. At the official page[1] it's possible to download the data after registering. This page was created, in compliance with the licence, to facilitate access to the resources and an extra repository.
For any further information, it is advisable to consult the official information provided by IGM.
License
DBSN is released under the license Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) ver. 1.0 [2].
The licence is the same used by OpenStreetMap and is compatible for importing on OSM. However until August 2025 it was not clear whether Contributor terms would allow to import them.
As of June 2025 the open issues of Contributor Terms includes the following:
Under section 3, the CTs offer the potential to relicense data in future under another "free and open license", so even if OSM adopted another share a like license in future, it may not be compatible with ODBL just as CC-by-SA isn't compatible with ODBL.
Under section 1, Person A downloads some or all of the OSM data, they make changes to that data and offer it on their own website as required by the ODBL. Person B comes along and wants to import that data into OSM, but they can't incorporate that information back into OSM because they do not have the right to grant OSM the ability to relicense that data in future.
Import guidelines don't include references to this issue nor to the Contributor Terms.
In absence of a specific waiver by IGN for OSM contributor terms and in absence of a clear permission for ODbL imports, all imports from DBSN had been halted.
The matter has been discussed in multiple community threads (like this and this) and this SOTM Europe 2023 talk.
On August 11th 2025 the LWG, asked for a clarification specifically on the DBSN case with ticket #2025060310000151, has clarified that DBSN is compatible to be imported in OSM:
For the situation you describe, the LWG has concluded that it is acceptable to bring this data into OSM. Specifically:
1. LWG takes the view that any ODbL data can be imported into OSM. We must at this point consider future licence changes unlikely. Furthermore, if any do occur, many other ODbL data sets have already been brought into OSM - any future licence change will need to consider this fact and determine how best to deal with it - for example, original data owners would have to be approached for waivers.
2. Given 1, there is no legal obstacle to bringing in the data. As with any data import, it remains important that the approved process is followed, in particular, indicating the source licence as part of the edits and adding any required attribution to our copyright page.
Available area
Data is split by province and was released in multiple steps. On 2023-08-23 all italian territory has been released.
A full list of download links by region and province (from IGM and from a Wikimedia Italia mirror) can be found at this link.
Data model
The data model is documented in the official specification PDF (in italian). Inside it are listed and documented numbers and codes that allow to identify the geographic elements inside the dataset.
Data is divided gerarchically in strato ("layer", ex. "Immobili e antropizzazioni", number 02), tema ("theme", ex. "Edificato", number 02 01) and classe ("class", ex. "Edificio", number 02 01 02, code EDIFC).
Every geographic element has also "attributi" ("attributes", ex. "Tipologia edilizia", number 02 01 02 01, code EDIFC_TY), conceptually similar to OSM tags, which have a "valore" ("value", ex. "edificio tipico", number 03) and can have a "sottovalore" ("subvalue", ex. "nuraghe", number 03 01).
In Italy/DBSN/Mapping it's possible to find an incomplete list of mappings between DBSN and OSM data models, contributions are welcome.
Working with the data
View the data
The content of the DBSN is distributed via the .zip files listed above. You can directly explore the data from these zips with a GIS tool. For example, to open it in QGIS simply drag the file onto the QGIS window and then click "Add layer".
Working with the data from command line
To filter and elaborate the data firstly you need to extract the zip files.
For example this command extracts the content of AG_dbsn_1d0K3z.zip in the folder AG_unzipped (creating it if it does not exist):
unzip 'AG_dbsn_1d0K3z.zip' -d 'AG_unzipped'
Inside the extracted folder you will find a series of files with metadata and instructions and a folder whose name ends in ".gdb", which contains an ESRI Geodatabase.
Once you know the code of the class to which the objects of interest belong and the values that the attributes they must have, it is possible to filter these elements with GDAL. For example, this command filters the hospitals (class code EDIFC, attribute edifc_uso=030102) present in the province of Agrigento (the folder extracted above), transforms them into WGS84 and saves them in a .geojson file:
ogr2ogr -f 'GeoJSON' -t_srs 'EPSG:4326' -where "EDIFC_USO = '030102'" "AG_ospedali.geojson" "AG_unzipped/Agrigento_dbsn.gdb" "EDIFC"
It's possible to find in this repository some high level scripts based on these commands.
Working with the data from the code
All libraries based on GDAL (including fiona e GeoPandas) allow to open the file with the driver OpenFileGDB.
Other resources
Code and tools to use the data
- GitHub repository napo/dbsnosmcompare
- GitHub repository Danysan1/dbsn-import
- GitHub repository musuruan/osm_imports
- Italy/DBSN/Mapping
Analysis on data and articles
- In-depth DBSN-OSM comparison paper from FOSS4G 2023 Academic Track
- "OpenStreetMap conquista anche l’Istituto Geografico Militare" (archived from de.straba.us)
- Notebook on dsantini.it