[Talk-us] [OSM-talk] tiger polygons

[Dave Hansen]

On Tue, 2007-12-18 at 21:19 -0500, Paul Fox wrote:
> i should qualify my offer to help with the disclaimer that i know
> exactly zilch about osm internals.  all that i know, i learned from
> reading xml (and binary mobile) output.
> 
> what's interesting about "negative ids"?

Well, if you have two nodes that you want to upload, you keep track of
them locally as -1 and -2 (or -444 and -555 or whatever).  That
distinguishes them from the positive ids used on the OSM server, but it
also lets you distinguish them from _each_other_.  The fact I kept that
mapping just means that you can take the node -5345243524 in my .osm
files, and figure out where it got stuck on the server and what it's
current OSM id is.

> in what format does the data need to be in, for import?  (i should
> unpack your tarball...) 

The shell scripts in there will actually feed off the TIGER website.
The ruby scripts themselves run off of an unzipped TGRXXXXX.zip file's
directory.

-- Dave