[Talk-us] National Map Corps Revived - And Using the OSM Stack

[Eric Wolf]

I'm probably not supposed to email you all but I hate seeing unanswered
questions.

We have official publications about the project:

FactSheet: http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/fs20113103
Phase 1: http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/ofr20111136

An OFR on Phase 2 is due out any day now. Watch the RSS feed here:
http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/#home

Phase 1 was purely an evaluation of the OSM software. Phase 2 was a test to
see if the data could be integrated into The National Map. Phase 3 is a
test to see what it would be like in production.

We switched to Potlatch2 at the end of Phase 1. Our version of P2 is
modified (slightly) to only allow the very small number of structure types
(nodes) that we need for The National Map to be added. In fact, we went
through the entire system and disabled features that didn't fit our needs.
The result is a much simpler user experience.

We are hoping to submit the data to OSM itself but we are very sensitive to
the issues of bulk uploads from "authoritative" data sources. We don't want
to do this until we have a good way to manage the process. One thought was
to only update the same features that are in OSM but haven't been changed.
The data we are looking at was part of the GNIS database which was bulk
uploaded into OSM in 2009. Most of that data is untouched (except for bots)
in OSM and still has the USGS feature ID (gnis:feature_id) saved in a tag.
In theory, we could automatically update only the data from our system with
matching gnis:feature_id tags in OSM that haven't been touched by humans.
The rest of the data would have to managed manually.

We do create a nightly planet file:
http://navigator.er.usgs.gov/planet/planet.osm

Feel free to explore the data. You can also explore the system without
creating an account using "guest" as the user ID and "usgsguest" as the
password. Changes from that account are reverted nightly.

-Eric

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Eric B. Wolf                           720-334-7734





On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 6:12 PM, Charlotte Wolter <techlady at techlady.com>wrote:

>  Ian,
>
> **        **I read through their Web site.
> **        **They used Potlatch 1 for two pilot projects in
> "crowdsourcing" (yes, they used the word) topographic data. Apparently they
> were pleased enough with the results to plan to move ahead, at some point,
> with crowdsourced topographic mapping. I hope they have taken a look at
> Potlatch 2.
> **        **They also mentioned OSM several times on a couple of Web
> pages, which was nice publicity.
>
> Charlotte
>
>
>
> At 02:50 PM 7/22/2012, you wrote:
>
> Yep. They announced it prematurely. They'll have more information about it
> in the near future.
>
> On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Adam Schreiber <adam.schreiber+osm at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>  Ian,
>
> The link appears to be dead.  Was the video taken down?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Adam
>
> On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I saw a tweet from @USGS today mentioning that the National Map Corps are
> > starting up again. If you don't know what the National Map Corps is,
> think
> > of it like "OpenStreetMap for the US Government". Volunteer mappers
> > correcting and adding to the topo maps all over the country. I'm sure
> there
> > are others with much more information, but it was a pretty epic project
> and
> > is the source for lots of the free and public domain data we use to this
> > day.
> >
> > For the last year or two (or three?) Eric Wolf's been working to adapt
> the
> > OpenStreetMap stack to the USGS's needs, and it looks like it that work
> has
> > finally been released. Check out this video for more information:
> > http://gallery.usgs.gov/videos/552. Skip to 4:10 or so to see it in
> action.
> >
> > Hopefully Eric and others will respond here and tell us more about it!
> >
> > -Ian
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Talk-us at openstreetmap.org
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> >
>
>
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> **
>
> ** Charlotte Wolter
> 927 18th Street Suite A
> Santa Monica, California
> 90403
> +1-310-597-4040
> techlady at techlady.com
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>
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