[Imports] ArcGIS toolbox to OSM script

[Reiser, John J.]

Frederik,

Right now, the multipolygon relations are only created for multipart polygons in a shapefile or geodatabase feature class. They would share the set of nodes between multiple ways. I have been kicking around the idea of writing another script that would dump a polygon feature class to a line feature class (with left/right attributes retained) and build multipolygons from that. Right now, if I exported the counties of New Jersey, where each boundary is shared with another (except for the outer boundaries) each county boundary would be its own way. This made sense to me when I was writing this, because I had the land use/land cover in mind. Once I realized it'd produce less than ideal results for other types of polygon features like administrative boundaries, I realized it would need a rewrite.

I have released academic presentations, workshop materials and design work under CC licensing. I used CC because its familiar. I'm aware of the GPL and its ilk, but never actually used it, or knew that CC was incompatible. I'll explore the free software licenses and make a change. What I get out of projects like this is that (through attribution) I get a sense of who's using it and (through share-alike) I can feel assured that if someone else makes improvements those changes could be used by everyone, including myself. 

Thanks again for the info. 
John

John Reiser
GIS Support Specialist
Rowan University
web: http://users.rowan.edu/~reiser/


-----Original Message-----
From: Frederik Ramm [mailto:frederik at remote.org] 
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 11:56 AM
To: Reiser, John J.
Cc: imports at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [Imports] ArcGIS toolbox to OSM script

Hi,

Reiser, John J. wrote:
> I've developed a python script for exporting from ArcGIS directly to the 
> .OSM file format used by JOSM. The script is available here: 
> http://users.rowan.edu/~reiser/osm/

Sounds as if you've thought of the major issues. Will your multipolygons 
also share a *way* if there are e.g. two administrative boundaries that 
touch each other, or will you create two ways that simply share nodes? 
While the 2nd option is still better than duplicating nodes, the 1st 
option is the preferred way to do it.

> The code has been released under a CC by-sa-nc license. 

That sure is an unusual license for software. Both Creative Commons [0] 
  and the Free Software Foundation [1] generally advise *against* using 
CC-BY-* for software. Unless you have a very specific reason for this 
(and are comfortable with your software not being compatible with most 
other free software), you should perhaps reconsider.

[0] http://creativecommons.org/software
[1] http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"