[Talk-us] bulk upload of data to OSM: roads, water, and orthos

[Dave Hansen]

On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 12:42 -0400, John Callahan wrote:
> Spatially it's no contest.  I've attached just a few simple images to
> show what I mean.  These show our new dataset in red vs TIGER 2007 in
> purple.  Remember that the red lines match the hi-res photography.

Wow.  Hard to argue with that!  It does look great.

> Attributes are also an improvement for geocoding, routing, and naming.

True.  We do have addresses in the TIGER data, but I chose not to upload
them for now.  OSM didn't have relations when I was doing the original
TIGER upload, and I'm still not sure there is any consensus on how to do
address data.  Probably good to bring up on dev@ or talk at .

> Good question about contacting OSM editors of this data.  I can easily
> contact most of the GIS data professionals and
> govt'/consultant/University people who typically with transportation
> data.  However, that does leave out the single individual, say at
> home, who modifies the data.  Not sure how often that happens.  I can
> always keep an copy of the current OSM data before uploading the new
> data set and replace parts of needed.  Or is there a way to find any
> edits made since the intial loading of the TIGER?

My suggestion would be to get a planet file, and try to extract the
areas that you care about.  

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Planet.osm

You could just about download the entire thing in JOSM, too.  It's a
pretty dinky^Wmodestly sized state. ;)

Once you have a copy of the existing .osm data, just grep through the
XML to look for authors, or look at the authors panel in JOSM.

-- Dave