[Talk-us] NHD imports

Ben Supnik bsupnik at xsquawkbox.net
Mon Oct 29 15:53:03 GMT 2012


Hi Paul,

On 10/29/12 11:47 AM, Paul Norman wrote:
>> 2. The conversion required running a non-GUI tool, which meant having
>> command line skills, etc.
>
> This is actually a plus for me - handling all of NHD without command line
> scripts would be difficult. There's a *lot* of data.

Right - for anyone working on the _entire_ NHD data set, you really need 
automation, command-line, and to be comfortable with bulk processing. 
My original goal was to do this on the behalf of new mappers, while 
leaving the 'edit and review' process to everyone else, since it has to 
be done by hand.

> This is actually mostly solved now -
> http://www.cyclestreets.net/edit/locate/ has a PL2 instance which has a
> vector layer background for all of the UK.
>
> There are a few issues like loading many GB of data into the server
> supplying the vector layer and making it available without deploying your
> own PL2 instance, but these are fairly minor.

Cool -- my thinking was that the closer we get the NHD data to being 
'click ready' the more people can help to get it reviewed and into OSM.

In particular, I was looking to find an answer to my user's question 
"how can I help get the lakes back near where I live", one that didn't 
require import skills.  If I can say "load OSM on this potlatch and 
import this pre-existing layer if the lake is missing" with some 
editorial guidelines, that's good for a general audience.

> The splits I'm talking about are being split into layers. You have lakes on
> one layer and rivers on another, etc.
>
> The splits by area remain similar although I believe the pre-staged files
> cover a larger area (HUC4 basins) than what you were given did.

Ah - yeah, that's all 'what I got' - HUC8 split by a bunch of layers 
based on topology.  Since I requested shapefiles, that may have been 
inevitable. :-)

> Maybe I picked an odd region or layer. There are some areas in the NHD that
> are quite different from all the others and use FCodes in different ways. I
> should know the dangers of concluding something by looking only at one part
> of NHD :)

If you were looking at an area that should have had sane tagging and it 
did not contain sane OSM codes, let me know the HUC8 code or something 
and I can at least look at the original shape files in QGIS and see if 
they were majorly borked.  I did look at 2 or 3 HUC8s to make sure they 
were sane and they seemed plausibly full of tags...

cheers
Ben

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