[Imports] HIFLD

[James Crawford]

Hi Mike,


On 10/2/2022 1:51 PM, Mike Thompson wrote:
> * HIFLD seems to contain 570 separate datasets, it is unreasonable to 
> expect the community to review all of them to approve this import.  
> The people proposing the import need to narrow down the scope to just 
> a few datasets, or perhaps just one to start.

The imports listed on the wiki page are the datasets that I have deemed 
useful for importing/obtaining metadata for OSM. the full list link on 
the HIFLD website is somewhat misleading to the total amount of datasets 
that are eligible for OSM. there are a lot of datasets that have 
duplicate entries as both "feature layer" and "file geodatabase" but 
contain the same data. If you filter the data to just contain the 
feature layers, it narrows it down to about 376 datasets. But I've 
omitted a lot of datasets from my list of candidates for a couple reasons:

1: it already has been imported into OSM

the HIFLD includes data from the NHD, GNIS, and TIGER datasets. these 
have already been imported into OSM and as such I could exclude these 
from consideration

2: the quality is too low

from the data I looked at in the mining datasets for example, the 
quality was overwhelmingly poor, and I chose to omit these because it 
would be closer to vandalism to add these due to the low quality.

3: the contents aren't within the scope of OSM

There are quite a few datasets, such as "Historical Tsunami Event 
Locations" or "Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Regions that don't 
record anything that physically exists on the ground and as such aren't 
verifiable or within the scope to include in OSM.


from a quick count, I already determined that about 92 datasets were 
eligible for OSM (listed on the wiki). when I reassess quality for the 
datasets, I may make the number even smaller.


> * As Greg suggested, we need to know how specifically the fields in 
> these datasets are going to be transferred into OSM tags.  Ideally 
> having the scripts used to do so, and the output in OSM format to 
> ensure the process worked as expected.
I've been writing specific instructions on an individual dataset basis 
in order to clearly translate tags in the database to tags in OSM. If I 
can figure out the scripting, I will document it then as well.
> * At least one of the datasets (Major Sports Venues) doesn't even 
> contain geometry/coordinates that I can determine, so I am not sure 
> how it can be imported.
"Major Sports Venues" isn't on the list of datasets that I deemed 
eligible for import probably for this reason.
> * I would recommend that where possible, the data be obtained from the 
> original source (other Federal agency, state, etc.). This ensures that 
> the most recent data is used (still might not be recent enough), and 
> that nothing has been lost in the process of merging/translating the 
> data into HIFLD.   I don't think HIFLD did any "value add" other than 
> aggregating various sources and perhaps some standardization (e.g. 
> individual features were not verified).
I can document and do this where possible.
> * Some of the data may not belong in OSM, e.g. "American Red Cross 
> Chapter Regions"

I'm aware of this, and I haven't listed any of these region datasets in 
my list of eligible data.



-James Crawford (SherbetS)
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