[Talk-us] US National Hydrography Dataset

[Matthew Perry]

Hey all,

 I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on incorporating the USGS
National Hydrography dataset (NHD) into openstreetmap. Basically it is
a dataset of all waterbodies, streams, lakes, dams, canals, etc in the
united states. More info is available at http://nhd.usgs.gov/ .

It is available in shapefile format (through an abysmal web mapping
interface / request system). I've worked up a preliminary script to
convert some of the common linear and polygon features. The script is
based heavily on the MassGIS import script by christopher schmidt.

http://perrygeo.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/gis-bin/nhd_to_osm.py

This converts the NHD shapefiles to OSM format. It works reasonably
well. Here are some notes on how the conversion is implemented:

=========

CURRENTLY IMPLEMENTED (NHD:FTYPE -> OSM:Tags):
Flowline:StreamRiver -> waterway:stream
Flowline:ArtificialPath;Canal -> waterway:canal
Flowline:Pipeline -> man_made:pipeline;type:water
Waterbody:SwampMarsh -> natural:marsh
Waterbody:Reservoir -> natural:water;man_made:reservoir
Waterbody:LakePond -> natural:water

- Uses GNIS_NAME as name tag if available.
- Applies oneway:true tag to streams and rivers to indicate flow
direction

TODO:
 - find a better way to download the NHD data (the arcIMS request
interface sucks)
 - For polygon waterbodies, need to incorporate holes
 - incorporate all dbf fields
 - point features
 - map the full NHD schema to osm features/tags
   (full desc of NHD schema:  http://nhd.usgs.gov/chapter2/index.html
)

=========

So my question's are:
Would anyone be interested in some sort of mass upload of hydrography
data (to follow on the success of the TIGER import!) ?
If not, would anyone object to me doing so for the areas of interest to me?
Anyone have any suggestions on improving the conversion routine before
I start uploading?

Thanks!

-- 
Matthew T. Perry
http://www.perrygeo.net