[talk-au] Queensland Wetland Systems - building an empirical data dictionary

[Brendan Morley]

Some of you have expressed interest in "cracking" the data dictionary for the Queensland Wetlands mapping data.  I've spent a few hours this weekend 
going through the web literature.  Hopefully I can distill the main concepts in a useful manner.

Firstly, the Wetlands/Streams layer at http://data.australia.gov.au/97 is borked - there is no shapefile included in the ZIP archive, therefore no geography to 
use or translate!

For the polygon area I have started a wiki page:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Data.australia.gov.au/Queensland/Wetlands

If nothing else, I have listed the reference documents that should shed some light on what each column means.  I've only started to write up the meanings 
myself.  I'll keep on updating these as I have time.

Also useful is a reference rendering, being the set of Qld EPA PDF maps available from 
http://www.epa.qld.gov.au/wetlandinfo/site/MappingFandD/WetlandMapsAndData/PDFMaps.html

As part of the wiki page I'll also add in some recommended transliterations between the attributes in the original dataset, and a tagging scheme in OSM.  
The data seems to support the following OSM features quite faithfully:

natural=wetland (duh - these are the Wetland Regional Ecosystems on the PDF maps)
  wetland=* (this can be mapped from the "RE" (Regional Ecosystem) type, e.g. a "wetre" attribute of "12.1.3" is basically equivalent to mangrove coverage)

natural=water (these are the Water Bodies on the PDF maps.  Larger reservoirs also seem to distinguish between full supply level and a typical level)

natural=spring (the literature refers to a springs layer but this does not appear to be CC-BY yet)

natural=coastline and maybe =beach (I can never remember if natural=coastline is supposed to mean high water or low water, doesn't matter, the wetlands 
dataset typically deliniates the intertidal area anyway)


Good luck everyone,
Brendan