[Talk-us] Mass towns

[Peter Dobratz]

sounds good.

I think some of the county borders are already in the map as
overlapping Ways, and I was planning on cleaning those up eventually.

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 9:05 AM, Metcalf, Calvin (DOT)
<calvin.metcalf at state.ma.us> wrote:
> Yeah ways on top of ways would be bad, I grabbed the massgis arcs from survey points without coast which is a file that has just the linework with off shore boundaries,  the ways are currently already split at junctions, my method is going to be
> 1. take out counties boundaries and state boundary
> 2. take out boundaries already in
> 3. check to see if anything already there corresponds to the border (river etc)
>
> Would that be helpful or am I missing the source of duplicate ways/need for splitting?
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: peter.dobratz at gmail.com [mailto:peter.dobratz at gmail.com]
>>On Behalf Of Peter Dobratz
>>Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 8:56 AM
>>To: Metcalf, Calvin
>>Cc: talk-us at openstreetmap.org; imports at openstreetmap.org
>>Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Mass towns
>>
>>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Shp-to-osm.jar
>>
>>It's basically just a Java command-line program that reads in a .shp
>>file and produces an .osm file.  It can use a configuration (rules)
>>file that allows you to map attributes in the .shp to tags in the
>>.osm, but I just create an empty rules file and add appropriate tags
>>manually.
>>
>>If you find it easier to add Ways without Relations first that would
>>be useful.  But I would avoid adding Ways on top of each other, as it
>>would seem like just as much work to start from scratch instead of
>>having to split Ways and delete duplicate Ways before adding them to
>>Relations.
>>
>>On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 8:14 AM, Metcalf, Calvin (DOT)
>><calvin.metcalf at state.ma.us> wrote:
>>> So on ubuntu you can open up a self extracting exe with
>>archive manager (I smacked myself in the head when I learned
>>that, turns out massgis makes them on linux).   I'm not
>>familiar with shp-to-osm.jar link? I've been using Merkaartor
>>to convert, but that usually forces me to then use kate or
>>gedit to clean up the tags it makes. I wasn't going to add any
>>extra tags except maybe population (so that a renderer could
>>use the relations to label).   Would it make sense for me to
>>add the ways now with relations to come as people are able, or
>>does that sound like it wouldn't save much time?
>>>
>>>>-----Original Message-----
>>>>From: peter.dobratz at gmail.com [mailto:peter.dobratz at gmail.com]
>>>>On Behalf Of Peter Dobratz
>>>>Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 8:06 AM
>>>>To: Metcalf, Calvin
>>>>Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Mass towns
>>>>
>>>>I had just added Tyngsborough and Dunstable and my plan was to work
>>>>along the NH/MA border downward, especially over the winter when it's
>>>>harder to go out and see things with the snow accumulation.  I also
>>>>plan on continuing to clean up NH towns as people often import them
>>>>such that you have lots of overlapping Ways.
>>>>
>>>>For NH towns, I had been starting with the TIGER shapefiles.
>>>>Generally I open the .shp file in QuantumGIS, then select a town and
>>>>save it as a .shp file using EPSG:4326 - WGS 84 coordinates.  Then I
>>>>run this .shp file through Shp-to-osm.jar with a blank rules.txt.
>>>>This gives me an OSM file without tags that I can open in JOSM in a
>>>>separate layer.  If there's already a Way in the map (mostly from a
>>>>border of a neighboring town), then I split and re-use part of the
>>>>existing way and add them to a relation.  If there are 2 or more
>>>>overlapping Ways in the map, then I delete all but one of
>>them and add
>>>>it to multiple relations.  If the way doesn't exist yet,
>>then I either
>>>>merge a portion from my other layer or for straight lines I
>>just merge
>>>>the 2 end-points instead of the tens of points all along a straight
>>>>line from TIGER.
>>>>
>>>>On the Way itself, I add boundary=administrative and admin_level=4
>>>>(state), admin_level=6 (county), admin_level=4 (city/town).  On the
>>>>relation, I add type=boundary, boundary=administrative, name=(actual
>>>>name of the town), admin_level=(4, 6, or 8), wikipedia=(appropriate
>>>>article link).  Each way of the border is added to the relation with
>>>>role as outer (unless there's an unusual border where an inner is
>>>>necessary to make a whole in the town or county).  Note: it
>>looks like
>>>>you could just as well use type=multipolygon on the relation as the
>>>>values for the roles are identical (inner/outer).
>>>>
>>>>Rather than deleting Ways or Relations in the database, I would
>>>>instead split existing Ways and edit existing Relations if they are
>>>>not right.
>>>>
>>>>For MA, I had also been using TIGER as I looked at MassGIS, but the
>>>>only download I could find was an EXE and wasn't sure how to extract
>>>>it on Mac or Ubuntu.  If you can point me to how to get an .osm file
>>>>from this on a non-Windows system, that would be helpful.
>>>>
>>>>It is annoying that MassGIS tends to use hundreds of points to
>>>>represent roads where 10 or so would suffice, and I've been deleting
>>>>hundreds of points on roads near what I happen to be editing.  Also,
>>>>if you do end up pulling stuff from MassGIS, try to avoid adding tens
>>>>of tags to each way just because there is a MassGIS database
>>field, as
>>>>they are probably not all relevant.
>>>>
>>>>As far as Boston goes, I would think you'd put the whole city in a
>>>>relation with admin_level=8.  There's no convention to map smaller
>>>>divisions within a city or town.  Looks like the
>>non-agreement on this
>>>>has been summarized on the wiki:
>>>>
>>>>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Neighborhood
>>>>
>>>>Peter
>>>>
>>>>On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 7:11 AM, Metcalf, Calvin (DOT)
>>>><calvin.metcalf at state.ma.us> wrote:
>>>>> As towns are the primary division in MA that peole tend to
>>>>use I'd like to add them to osm.  From what I can tell a few
>>>>have been put in near NH as boundary relations (tyngsborough
>>>>and dunstable) one has been put in as a closed way (stow) and
>>>>10 or so have been put in in the south west as multipolygon
>>relations.
>>>>> Looking for some suggestions on the best way to do it, seems
>>>>to me after playing around a bit last night that it would be
>>>>something along the lines of taking the town boundary arcs
>>>>from massgis, probably simplifing them, deleting any arc
>>>>already up (county boundery, state boundary coast), uploading
>>>>those arcs as ways with boundary=admin and admin_level=8, add
>>>>admin_level=8 to the current 4 and 6 ways, a/d then longer
>>>>term putting in the relations.
>>>>> Is there a better or easier way? Which of the 3 ways used so
>>>>far is prefered (if any).  And if I wanted to add cambridge
>>>>and boston neiborhoods how would I tag that (cambridge I made
>>>>myself as cambridge gis somehow figured out how to embed a pdf
>>>>inside a kml).
>>>>> Sent with Verizon Mobile Email
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