[Talk-us] Shape to OSM conversion

Victor Snesarev victor.snesarev at gmail.com
Fri Jul 25 12:10:42 BST 2008


There've been several discussions on converting shapefile data form local
governments to OSM. Like Ian, I've been hacking around with Python looking
to convert local county data to OSM. So, I wanted to start a separate thread
to discuss the process. Here it goes...

First of all, it seems that a generic Shapefile-to-OSM script is impossible
to write without writing a conversion application around it. The reason I
say this is because shapefile feature attributes are set by whoever is
compiling the data, and they are probably quite different between
counties/locations. For example, my county's street centerline data has
attributes like "STNAME", "STYPE", "DIR_SUF", etc. Some other county's data
will have completed different names. Seems to me that this makes it
impossible to automate the task of mapping Shapefile attributes to OSM tags.
The conversion script user would have to specify this mapping. Is that
right?

The other issue I suspect is that the conversion process would be different
for street centerline data versus, say, police station location or parks and
recreation areas. Street centerline data is stored as a PolyLine shape type
in the Shapefile, while police station locations are Points, and parks are
Polygons. Is that right?

I am not saying that it is not possible to write a fairly complete
application to analyze the shape file and present the user with choices for
mapping feature attributes to OSM tags. I just want to get others' views on
the issues involved in a conversion script.

One more point... Can anyone comment on advantages/dissadvantages of adding
an OSM export plugin for something like MapWindow<http://www.mapwindow.org/>,
QGIS <http://www.qgis.org/>, Mapnik <http://mapnik.org/>or some other GIS
application?

Victor
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