[Talk-us] NHD status?

[Karl Newman]

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 7:57 AM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 9:51 AM, Doug Morrison-Cleary <lists at hildormen.net>wrote:
>
>> Nooooooo. I live in northern MN and all we have around here are lakes!
>> I really want them in yesterday <grin>. Please :-)
>
>
> Ok I suppose I should have been more explicit. The lakes and river areas
> seem to be the easiest to tag in OSM. They are bodies of water. The sticky
> parts are the marshes and canals/drainage ditches.
>
> Perhaps we could just start an import with tags that make sense for these
> things (e.g. natural=marsh). Either that or we only import the FCode/FTypes
> that have an obvious OSM tagging scheme right now and import the other stuff
> later.
>

I think you should import everything. Maybe. I'm not fully versed in the
NHD, and I understand it has some things like flood channels which are
filled only during 100-year floods or something... But even the more obscure
water features might be useful to someone. Anyway, where the OSM tags line
up, use those, otherwise you could invent some tags (like someone mentioned,
hydrology or hydrography as a key name is a possibility, especially for
things like flowlines which probably shouldn't be on the default map). I
think you should always include a nhd:ftype and/or nhd:fcode tag to link
back to the source. Otherwise you might force fit a bunch of fine-grained
NHD categories into one broader OSM tag and then we would lose detail.

Karl
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