[Talk-ht] [OSM-talk] manual import of LSIB data to repair redaction damage to borders

[Michael Krämer]

Hi,

from the amount of responses I guess borders are a topic not too many
people are interested in...

2012/9/7 Ian Villeda <villeda at mapbox.com>

> I've noticed that international borders all over Central America and the
> Caribbean were damaged by the redaction[1].  I'm proposing a limited,
> manual import of USAID's LSIB data[2] to repair the border between Haiti
> and the DR. Data is owned and maintained by the US Federral Gov't so it is
> public domain (and many of existing borders look like they were originally
> imported from US Census Bureau or CIA data). Data look as highly resolved
> as the existing borders (or better), and not too node-y, although I will be
> sure to simplify any offending segments.
>

I agree that the data is pretty good, often even better than existing data
e.g. from the CIA World Database. I have used that for example to update
the border between Sudan and South Sudan.


> The ogr2osm translation function[3] includes only admin_level= and
> boundary=administrative tags - there's no other relevant attributes in the
> source data.
>

I would rather not tag these to the way itself but cover this using the
relations. But I would add a source-Tag to the way, e.g. I had used
"source=Large Scale International Boundary (US DoS/INR/GGI)". But as I just
noticed that the data got updated recently I would now probably also
include the month/year of the edition used.

I don't know if that's relevant for the borders you're looking at but I
remember that there's some attribute classifying the status of the border
i.e. if there's any dispute or so. If there's any variation I think it
would be valuable to maintain the information somehow.


> Once in josm, I plan on manually copying the way segments from the import
> layer into an active editing layer and manually connect imported segments
> to exising ways + include them in the relevant relations. I've included a
> sample osm file here[4] that you can review. Let me know what you think
> about the border repair plan and what I'm missing. thanks,
>

The plan sounds fine to me.

Michael