[Imports] US Forest Service Data

[Andy Allan]

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 7:27 PM, Tom Ponte <tgis at bendbroadband.com> wrote:
> I just imported an OSM area that I am planning on doing some imports to my
> machine. I am testing out the ESRI OSM import extension for ArcGIS. In the
> osmuser attribute field there are a couple of edits listed that are not
> listed as Tiger data based on the user names. Most of them for instance say
> JohnDoeTiger so I am assuming that if there was not tiger after the osmuser
> name it isn't tiger data.

That's a very bad assumption. Detecting what is tiger and what isn't
tiger is a bit of a black art, and it's not based on user names
containing the word "Tiger". The best heuristic that I have found is
the one I created myself for the Tiger Edited Map, and the details are
at

https://github.com/MapQuest/TIGER-Edited-map/blob/master/inc/layer-tiger.xml.inc#L50

Also I should warn that OSM user names are mutable, so you should base
things on the id instead.

> How come if there are six tags visible when
> editing in Potlach that all start with tiger:xxxxxx that none of that comes
> through when you import the data?

The ESRI import tool is limited in functionality, since it has
different concepts to OSM data. It's definitely not to be used as a
way of analysing OSM data unless you can find out all the
manipulations it does internally - which I suspect involves dropping
lots of tags, as well as conversion from OSM data primitives to simple
geometry primitives.

> Do I
> need to back up and spend some time with JOSM to compare?

I'd suggest sticking to OSM tools for this kind of thing.

> I did a little looking around on this but if you did find something that was
> edited locally how do you contact the person who did the edit if you think
> your data is better than their edit? I am not seeing any contact info when I
> am in edit mode with Potlatch.

It's different depending on different versions of Potlatch. An
alternative is to use the data layer on www.osm.org - clicking on a
feature gives a link to the details page, which has a link to the user
who last edited it, from their page you can send them a message.

Cheers,
Andy