[OSM-talk] offer of 20m contour data

[Andy Allan]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 9:24 PM, Robin Paulson <robin.paulson at gmail.com> wrote:
> i've been offered contours for new zealand under a cc license. the
> precision is 20m, which i believe is higher than that of the srtm
> data.

Are you being offered a 20m DEM, or just the contours generated from a
DEM? The DEM is more useful (it's a grid of spot-heights) since it can
be used to generate hillshading etc too.

> how would i go about getting these into osm? from what i can tell,
> contours are generally handled differently to other data

Yes, all height data is processed completely independently. To get it
used within OSM maps and other services (e.g. height profiles on
routing websites) needs two things

1) The DEMs to be made available. Find some space on a webserver, and
document them on the wiki.
2) Each individual renderer (etc) to use the DEMs. This will be
different amounts of work for different people, so I would expect some
people just to stick with SRTM unless they have a particular interest
in NZ.

Cheers,
Andy