[Imports] [Talk-us] Kern County progress

[Toby Murray]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 4:44 PM, Nathan Mixter <srmixter at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I have begun cleaning up the area around Kern County, California. It is
> starting to not only look better but be less cluttered.
> I originally imported landuse data from both Kern County and the City of
> Bakersfield. Some areas from these two agencies overlapped around
> Bakersfield, and I have been going through and trying to remove these. The
> city data were quite good and included landuse areas, buildings, parks and
> even individual trees within the city. The county data tended to be generic
> in several places. It also was slightly misaligned in spots particularly in
> the rural areas, possibly due to the projection it was created with by the
> county.
> I have been going through and systematically deleting the redundant areas
> and breaking down the over used landuse=farm and landuse=residential tags
> into more specific areas. And in the process, I have been covering some of
> the ugly white space that has remained empty.
> A lot of the areas are now natural=heath. There is not really any good way
> to differentiate between meadow and heath areas. Still seems like they can
> be used interchangeably sometimes. I've been trying to use meadow for an
> area that can be used for grazing. I just started using the heath tag for
> open areas generally on areas east of Highway 5. It's not a perfect option
> but at least it kind of matches the work others have done around Las Vegas
> and in the desert.
> I've been trying to integrate the existing Kern County data with the FMMP
> farm data, which I have imported for other counties around the state as
> well.
>
> As part of the cleanup, I am adding some new buildings in Bakersfield from
> city data. I am only adding new building that have been added since the
> original import and verifying that they don't exist to avoid dups. Probably
> less than 1,000 total new buildings. Originally, I included bak:fac_type1,
> bak:fac_type2 and bak:fac_type3 tags on some buildings to correspond to tags
> in the data. These are not needed and can be removed en mass by a script in
> the future. I am leaving those tags out and incorporating them into the
> building= tag (ie building=residential, building=commercial) for new
> buildings.
> I also created a long overdue Kern County page on the wiki to keep track of
> the changes (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Kern_County,_California).
>
>
> Thanks to everyone who has contacted me to help out with the cleanup and
> offered advise. If anyone is interested in helping or has any suggestions,
> feel free to jump in or let me know.


Thank you for putting effort into cleaning this data up.

Also, I'm not sure if you noticed or not but as I was fixing some
interstates in the area I noticed a bunch of "<Null>" values in tags
on the Bakersfield buildings. They were in the bak:fac_type,
description and notes tags. I went ahead and nuked a bunch of them
(only ones with <Null> as the value) but that is something to keep an
eye out for if you are planning on importing new ones.

Toby