[Talk-us] US Bureau of Land Management Boundaries

[Ian Dees]

Hi Brad, thanks for proposing this import and posting it here.

I would strongly prefer that we not import boundaries like this into OSM.
Boundaries of all sorts are almost impossible to verify with OSM's "on the
ground" rule, but BLM boundaries in particular are such an edge case (they
have no other analog in the world, really) and almost never have apparent
markings on the ground to check. Since these boundaries aren't visible,
this data can never be improved by an OpenStreetMap contributor. The
boundaries are defined by the government, and any sort of change to them
would make them diverge from the official source.

But having said that, I'm curious why you wanted to import this data? Did
you want to have it show up on the osm.org map? Are you trying to build a
custom map? Or are you excited to participate and improve OSM? If it's the
latter, there's lots of other data that is a better fit to import into OSM:
address points and building footprints come to mind, for example.

-Ian

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 9:03 PM brad <bradhaack at fastmail.com> wrote:

> I'd like to import BLM (US Bureau of Land Management) boundaries into
> OSM.    This is not an automated import as you can see from my workflow.
>
> Workflow:
> Download shape file from PADUS (1 state at a time):
> https://gapanalysis.usgs.gov/padus/data/download/
> Load into Qgis and filter for BLM boundaries
> Clean up as necessary (there are some extraneous ways at state
> boundaries & elsewhere)
>
> Convert to OSM with ogr2osm and the following tags
>      tags.update({'type':'boundary'})
>      tags.update({'boundary':'protected_area'})
>      tags.update({'operator':'BLM'})
>      tags.update({'ownership':'national'})
>      tags.update({'protect_class':'27'})
>      tags.update({'source':'US BLM'})
>      use the shapefile attribute 'Unit_Nm' as the name
>
> Import with JOSM
>
> The San Luis unit (CO) is here for your inspection.
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/qxv5gny2396ewki/sanLuisBLM.osm?dl=0
>
> Comments?
>
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