[Imports] Designated Wilderness area import

[Erik G. Burrows]

I'm sure you all saw my posts to the Talk mailing list on this subject,
but I'm working my way through the "Import Guidelines" wiki page, which
requests a post to this list:

The "Designated Wilderness Areas" in the USA are of great interest to
people like me, who like to explore the less populated places in the US.
The "Wilderness Act" (1964) specifies that:

"...lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural
condition..." Section 2(a) (Wilderness.net)

"...shall be devoted to the public purposes of recreation, scenic,
scientific, educational, conservation and historic use." Section 4(b)
(Wilderness.net)

These areas are made publicly available through several US government
agencies, including the US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management,
National Park Service, etc. The "National Atlas" site makes all of the
Wilderness Areas available for download as a single shapefile:

http://www.nationalatlas.gov/mld/wildrnp.html

(There is also a ton of other great information available for download at
this site.)


Many of these areas are already imported into the OSM database, as part of
USFS imports, and many of the areas are already defined as other types of
objects, such as parks and preserves. However, most of the Designated
Wilderness areas are not in the OSM database.

I'd like to work to import these areas. There has already been some
discussion on the "talk" mailing list about the details, especially the
need to be careful not to duplicate data already in the database.

I think there will need to be a substantial amount of manual work done to
ensure no data duplication occurs, and some cleanup of enclosing boundary
areas, so the process I'm planning on using is fairly manual:

1. Convert the National Atlas shapefile into KML using ogr2ogr.*
  *The intermediate step through KML format is necessary because gpsbabel
below needs 3-D coordinates on input, but this shapefile is 2-D. The KML
file allows for manual (perl script) addition of a zero-value
z-coordinate.

2. Convert the KML file into OSM format using gpsbabel.

3. Use JOSM to add each area to the OSM database manually by copying areas
from the shapefile-derived layer to the downloaded OSM layer for that
region.

Some metadata is lost in this process, such as the area state, state FIPS
code, managing agency, unique ID and URL to wilderness.net. In order to
restore this data, I plan to either create a patch for gpsbabel to tunnel
this metadata through, or create a perl script to copy this data from the
KML file to the OSM file.

There are > 1300 total designated wilderness areas, so the manual nature
of this process means the import will take some time. Fortunately, many of
the areas are in very remote regions, with little other data nearby, so
can be added with little work correcting conflicts.

Your comments, suggestions and assistance are greatly appreciated.

-Erik Burrows

-- 
If you are flammable and have legs, you're never blocking a fire exit.
-Mitch Hedberg