[OSM-dev] Choking on the full-planet file

[Mike N]

On 2/25/2011 1:07 PM, Eric Wolf wrote:
 > What I'm trying to do is look at changes to the USGS GNIS data in OSM.
 > I want to convert node data for the US (probably just the lower 48
 > states) into a format that I can work on in ArcGIS. I want to have
 > access to historical data.

   Check into starting with the North America extract from Cloudmade: 
http://downloads.cloudmade.com/north_america/united_states

   Also, adding to What Ian said -

   - In many cases, I remove xyz(historical) since the feature no longer 
exists OSM doesn't have a good way to represent historical data.   That 
doesn't mean that the original GNIS data was invalid.

   - In a number of cases where I created a polygon, I didn't copy the 
original GNIS tags when I deleted the node.   That was before I realized 
the value of the tags for 2-way data exchange.