[Talk-us] Tools for importing National Hydrography Dataset?

[Jeffrey Ollie]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 4:02 PM, Chris Lawrence <lordsutch at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Jeffrey Ollie <jeff at ocjtech.us> wrote:
>>>
>>> Do any tools exist for importing data from the National Hydrography
>>> Dataset?  It'd be nice to have creeks/rivers/lakes in OSM instead of
>>> blank spaces, especially when I generate maps for my Garmin GPS.
>>
>> Jefft, we've been talking about doing it for quite a while. I have a
>> shapefile to OSM converter written in Java that is most of the way there
>> [1]. Christopher Schmidt has one written in Python [2].
>>
>> A few of us have uploaded local NHD data, but the nationwide import has not
>> started yet. Personally, I'm waiting for 0.6 to come out so we can take
>> advantage of the diff import features.
>>
>> [1] http://redmine.yellowbkpk.com/projects/list_files/geo
>> [2] http://crschmidt.net/blog/354/polyshp2osm/
>
> Speaking of polyshp2osm.py, here's a link to the version I modified
> for the TIGER place boundary data.  The major difference is that it
> now supports "multipolygons" imported from Shapefiles, which are used
> in TIGER to represent non-contiguous places (cities with exclaves
> etc.) instead of just dumping them as "degenerate rings."  I did make
> some changes in the code that are a little boundary-specific that
> probably should be refactored up into the "make your customizations
> here" section.
>
> Also included is my script that merges duplicated nodes in the
> shapefile, which are common along shared boundaries.  It's not quite
> as good a solution as using line-based borders, but I couldn't wrap my
> brain around an easy way to program an automated conversion from
> polygons to lines in any sensible way.  This one requires the Python
> lxml library (on Debian/Ubuntu, apt-get install python-lxml).  Thus
> far the filenames are hardcoded, which I may fix later.
>
> Hopefully these will be of some use for others.
>
> Both are at http://www.lordsutch.com/osm/

I seem to be doing something wrong here...  I've downloaded the
shapefiles for one of the subbasins that I'm interested in from NHD


-- 
Jeff Ollie