NWB

The Nationaal Wegenbestand, the Dutch national road database, is a digital geographic dataset of all roads in the Netherlands. It includes roads managed by the national government, provinces, municipalities and water authorities.

It covers roads that have a street name or number, including free standing footpaths and cycle paths and unpaved roads. A separate cycle path file, NWB Fietspaden, is published alongside the road file.

Use

The NWB is well suited to network analysis of the Dutch road network, with two limitations.

• It covers the Netherlands only. Note that even many fastest routes within the Netherlands run through Belgium or Germany, which a national file cannot represent. Either add a border zone from another source, or accept a systematic bias against locations near the border.
• Cycling and walking are only partially covered by the main road file. Modelling those modes properly requires the separate cycle path file, and even then the footpath network is less complete than in OSM.

In exchange, the NWB offers a consistent national data model, authoritative road management attributes and stable identifiers, which makes it attractive where results have to be tied to official Dutch road administration.

Alternatives

• OSM, global coverage, and better for cycling and walking
• Network data sources, full comparison