[OSM-talk] US County and State Borders Was: Re: TIGER, which states next?

[Ted Mielczarek]

On 10/24/07, Adam Schreiber <sadam at clemson.edu> wrote:
> Does the data for the counties and state borders come from a data
> source that could be imported into OSM?  I realize information freeway
> has state boundaries at low zoom levels but they disappear as you zoom
> in.  County boundaries would be busy at low zoom levels, but might be
> more approrpate at "state" level zooms.

Yep, they're all TIGER data, provided as shapefiles by the Census
bureau.  I've already imported the state boundaries for the northeast
of the US, you can see them in mapnik as dashed red lines.  I didn't
just throw them all in willy-nilly, I split the borders into sections
so I could label them left:state and right:state, and I deleted
overlapping border sections.  Sort of time consuming, but I thought
that trying to do it after the fact would be a pain given the scale of
the data.  I wanted to see what they looked like before I continued.
(Also I got busy on other things.)

The county data could probably be thrown in wholesale and fixed after
the fact, since it's a bit of a smaller scale.  The conversion is
pretty easy, I use ogr to get GML out of the shapefiles, then a little
custom python script to turn that GML into OSM XML.

-Ted