[Imports] [Talk-us] Importing Virginia road centerlines

[Andy Allan]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 6:59 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Ian Dees wrote:
>>
>> I think this is a great first step towards a "merging/importing toolkit".
>> A shapefile reading and rendering plugin for JOSM would be extremely nice to
>> have and was the original intention of my shp-to-osm code.
>
> ... as long as we make absolutely sure nobody can simply hit "load shape"
> and then "upload to OSM". The thing I like about Potlatch is that the mapper
> must (!) copy each element individually.

Let's be fair - the potlatch2 vector background layers aren't there
for "I've got a shapefile of an entire country, how can I add this to
OSM in a tedious fashion?" type situations. The intention is to help
mappers who may have access to additional sources of data - in
addition to imagery, raster maps and GPS data - and who want to use
them to aid their mapping sessions in one way or another. Transferring
information (geometries, attributes) from VBLs into the OSM layer is
rudimentary at the moment but can certainly be used as assistance when
editing.

I'd like to see the discussions head more towards "how can we use
shapefiles as an additional background aid" rather than "how do we
import them wholesale", and for my part I'm working on potlatch2 to
enable this. The recent work on making background raster layers
location-sensitive is something that I'd like to expand on for vector
layers - I'd quite like e.g. when editing in the US to have at least
the option of viewing tiger/state/USFS shapefiles as a reference
background without anyone needing to rasterise them first.

Cheers,
Andy