[Imports-us] Florida Water from Land Cover Import

[Brian May]

Hi List,

Florida's 5 Water Management Districts map land cover for the entire 
state. The data is provided in shapefile format. Florida has liberal 
public records laws as described in Chapter 119 of the Florida Statutes. 
Basically, all data (with a few exceptions) produced by state and local 
governments in Florida is public domain.

Another OSM user and I are proposing to tackle manually importing water 
derived from the land cover shapefiles produced by the Water Management 
Districts. In addition, we will update coastlines. We would also like to 
explore utilizing the wetlands and forest polygons from the land cover, 
however, I know there are potential problems with shared polygon borders 
and I'm not sure the best way to go about that.

I have seen a fair amount of NHD data that has been imported in parts of 
Florida, and from what I have seen so far, the water polygons derived 
from land cover are much more accurate, detailed, and up-to-date.

Some manual import work using this data has already been done, so partly 
we're "coming clean". I have read the import guidelines and kept up with 
this mailing list. In the past, I have subsetted out the water from the 
land cover SHP by selecting it in ArcMap and exporting to a new 
shapefile. Then used shp-to-osm to convert to OSM XML, loaded it into 
JOSM, and then copy/pasted the ways into the main OSM layer. In the 
past, I've tagged the ways with natural=water and source=SFWMD Land 
Cover 2008 (or whatever WMD the source was). I now know that adding the 
source tag to each way is not desirable and the source should be in the 
changeset. I have also brought the sub-setted  SHP directly into JOSM 
and copied ways that way. I've often cleaned up the ways to improve the 
quality of the linework and manually removed vertices. Some examples of 
this work are in Martin County FL and Broward County FL.  In addition, I 
have used parts of ways to improve parts of the coastline that was 
either unedited or poorly edited. Mainly in SW FL up to Tampa Bay.

The other person involved in this effort recently manually imported some 
water polygons from the land cover, but left a lot of unnecessary tags 
from the shapefile. We will work on cleaning these tags up. He is 
involved with the OSM Tampa group and will be enlisting help from them 
as well to clean up the recent issues and help with bringing in more data.

I have created an initial wiki page[1] and used the format and text from 
the Seattle Import page as a guide.

So, the next steps are to further flesh out the wiki page detailing the 
process, provide some sample OSM files for review, and discuss with the 
US OSM community before we do any more importing. We would also welcome 
any others who have an interest in helping out with the effort.

I want to stress that this will be a manual import consisting of loading 
in the OSM file to JOSM and manually copy/pasting ways into OSM. 
Additional linework editing will be done to improve the accuracy of the 
ways based on Bing imagery.

Brian May, aka grouper


[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Florida_Land_Cover_Import