[Imports] US Forest Service boundaries for WY and NE

[Toby Murray]

On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 8:54 AM, Roger Goldfinger <rgoldfinger at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> One of your moderators informed me I should seek guidance on some imports I
> made yesterday. They are:

Well first of all, welcome to the project. It's great to see active
users in places like Wyoming that haven't gotten very much attention
yet. I did some mapping there when I visited my cousin in Mountain
View. If I hadn't gotten stuck in a bilzzard on I-80 and had an extra
day there, I might have finished mapping the whole town :)

About the import:

We don't have moderators, we have a community that cares about its
data. I spotted your initial import and mentioned it on IRC. Someone
else noticed that there were some major things wrong with it.
Triplicate copies, not simplified, all tags applied to both nodes and
ways and no source information. Paul took action on it.

Have you read the import guielines on the wiki? For whatever reason,
imports are really hard to get right in OSM, even for seemingly simple
features. This is why we ask that anyone who imports things follows
some ground rules that try to mitigate some of the common problems...
like things getting uploaded 3 times. Not every point of the
guidelines may apply to every import but anyone doing imports should
be aware of all of them:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines

> #11196470 April 06, 2012 03:36 Added Buffalo Gap National Grassland
> boundries from USNF data
> #11196437 April 06, 2012 03:23 Added Thunder Basin National Grassland
> boundries from USNF data
> #11196408 April 06, 2012 03:15 Added Bighorn National Forest boundries from
> USNF data
> #11196396 April 06, 2012 03:12 Added Medicine Bow National
> Forest boundaries from USNF data
>
>
> For these imports, I converted the GIS boundary data from
> http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/gis/datasets_regionwide.shtml to .osm using
> merkaartor. I then opened the desired shares in josm, simplified them, and
> added the tags suggested on the Forest Service Wiki.
>
> Is this right, and if this isn't, how should I change it or what should I do
> differently?

Well the major thing I see in your second attempt is that you still
haven't listed a source. Even if the data is public domain, we still
want to know where it came from so that future contributers can
compare it to updated or more accurate sources that may be discovered.
Typically a source=* tag is added to ways and/or the changeset itself.
In this case since the changeset can't be edited any more I would
suggest adding this tag to the ways.

> I was also wondering how I should import Black Hills National Forest. As you
> can see here: http://g.co/maps/gav38 the forest is made up of nearly a
> hundred tiny areas, and one big area with a cutout.
>
> Is there a way to select all of the 100 ways that make up the forest without
> selecting the nodes?
> How to handle the cutout? An inner/outer relation?

Areas with holes are mapped with multipolygon relations. If you
haven't made any by hand in an OSM editor yet, please do so to become
familiar with them before attempting an import. Go find some buildings
with holes in them or a lake with an island or something like that.
Make a few of them and make sure they render on the map.

Lastly, since you are a pretty new user I'm guessing you aren't aware
of the upcoming license change. It has been requested by the
administrators that imports be suspended while the license change bot
is running to reduce load on the system. This will probably start some
time next week and continue for at least a week... probably longer.
Stay tuned to this mailing list.

Toby