[Imports] Import of Lakes from water.usgs.gov

[jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com]

On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Kate <maps2wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The current NHD either includes these updates or is higher quality than this
>> historical stuff that the USGS has. I would recommend working on importing
>> the NHD rather than other datasets.
>>
>> Also, lakes should not have a natural=coastline tag, they should be tagged
>> natural=water.
>>
>
> With imports of NHD or data from USGS, EPA, and elsewhere, it would be
> good to chop it up into chunks ... by states or smaller geographic
> units if it's a very large dataset.
>
> Since I (and others) are working in the DC area, it would be good to
> know what's being imported for our region, and perhaps be involved
> with QC.
>
> One of the issues with data imports is when duplicate data gets added,
> over what's already in OSM.  Some human judgment is needed to decide
> whether the existing data in OSM is better or what's being imported,
> and what to do where there are conflicts.
>
I agree completely. What I did with my splitter script is to create
one file per Item. Large lakes and things can be processed that way, I
just sorted the resulting files and loaded the biggest one into josm.
A splitting routine could be built to split the ways into 2000 node
chunks and creating of relationships.

Ideally we would be able to prepare this data, or create the tools and
have people run them themselves...

Well, I have not taken a look at the NHD data yet, but will do that
this weekend.
Thanks for your interest and support.

mike
mike