[Talk-us] importing zip codes

Martijn van Exel martijn at openstreetmap.us
Mon Feb 17 19:26:27 UTC 2014


Hi Charles,

Thanks for willing to help out getting better ZIP code coverage into
OSM. Importing from Census however is not the way to go, for reasons
Ian pointed out just now. I would add that OSM already contains higher
level administrative boundaries, most of which also derive from Census
data. So even if we were to consider another Census boundary import,
we would need to think about conflation with those already in the
data, which is not straightforward.
I would also suggest joining the imports-us mailing list as well and
bringing up this topic there.

Best
Martijn

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 12:11 PM,  <osm at charles.derkarl.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a shape file from census.gov which contains the boundaries for all zip
> codes in the US. This data should not need licensing in that it comes from the
> us federal census.
>
> I would also like the community to answer this technical question: Each
> boundary obviously shares a border with another zip code. Should those shared
> boundaries have the same way, and then each zip code becomes a relation?
>
> Failing any negative replies, I will cook up an implementation and provide
> some .osm files for review before importing.
>
> Charles
> Boulder Creek, CA, USA
>
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-- 
Martijn van Exel
President, US Chapter
OpenStreetMap
http://openstreetmap.us/
http://osm.org/



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