[OSM-talk] Contributing GIS Data to OSM

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 12:19 PM, IT Intern <itintern12 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you for your response Serge!  This is a very good outline and you are
> very kind to have given me this kind of walk through.  I have read through
> the docs about each part you outlined for me and have some more questions..

Great.

> "If you've signed up recently, you've accepted the new Contributor Terms"
> So I believe this means that I should work under OSM's future license
> policy, even though they have not yet made the crossover?

I'd like to avoid discussing licenses too much since it's a hot topic,
and not in the good way...

But if you've accepted the CT, the CT handles the licence transition
as far as OSM is concerned. But your organisation must be comfortable
handing this data to OSM and letting it re license it.

Let me put it to you another way...

Once you accept the CT and contribute the data to OSM, the data
belongs to the OSM Foundation, and the foundation may re license it.
There are very good reasons for this, but as you might imagine, this
can be somewhat controversial.

>  Or do I work
> under the current terms for now and then change everything later?  Sorry for
> asking what may seem like dumb questions, but I want to be really sure about
> this :)

Nothing dumb about this; it's a bit complex.

The short answer is, as long as you've accepted the CT on behalf of
your organisation and they're okay, you don't have to worry about
licenses again.

> "If you understand OSM, then you know how we use tags to classify features."
> My data is in a GIS database.  I looked at the tagging section of the docs.
> The way I understood it is that I have to change my database to reflect the
> tags?

You don't need to change your database to fit our API.

Let's imagine a fictional database full of historical fountains.

The table might be "fountains" and there might be a single row called "latlong"

OSM doesn't care about how the data looks internally, it only cares
about how the data looks when it enters the system, that is a fountain
from your system would need to come in like:

<node id="-1" lon="..." lat="..." version="1">
   <tag k="amenity" v="fountain" />
</node>

Using our XML schema as per the API documents.

This example is a little simplified, but you probably get the point,
which is that  OSM  only cares about the data representation as it
enters OSM, not how it's represented inside your own system.

>  I'm not really sure since I have a lot of columns with entries such
> as place_name, lon, lat, geom, etc.

In several jobs I've been at, I've had to do data mapping from one
system to another. Maybe one customer has one stream format they
prefer data in, and another is different.

OSM has its own format, and it would then be your job to map the
fields in your database to ours.

So for example, "place_name" might become "name", and so on.

> Another question about this is that I
> am working in the U.S., but I would be importing data for a region in an
> another country.  Do I follow the tagging system of the U.S. or do I follow
> that of the country I am importing for?

They should be roughly the same. Can you give me a specific example of
a difference?

> What if that country has different
> tagging systems for different regions and none listed for the region of my
> interest?

They generally don't. If they do, use the local one.

> As for importing data, I saw it mentioned somewhere that there is a test
> database for OSM that I can work with to ensure my actual import goes
> right.  Is this so?

dev06 is meant for experimentation of software and you are encouraged
to use it as such. The data in it is throwaway, so be aware that what
you see won't look like normal OSM data.

> Other than that is there a place I can show my .osm
> files for moderation and checked by an OSM team or professionals alike that
> will ensure me that my pending import data will benefit OSM?

That's an excellent question. I've been suggesting this for a long
time. My suggestion is join the import list, write up a wiki page on
it, share it, share the osm, wait for feedback. If you don't get any,
go for it. If you do get feedback, try to address it.

This process may seem slow, but as someone who has personally caused
import pain, and spent a long time cleaning it up, I can tell you it's
well worth it.

>  Also I saw
> that you said that mass data imports are not favored.  What constitutes as a
> "mass import" as opposed a more normal/manageable one?

Any automated process is generally disfavoured.

> As for the XML/.osm format, isn't there a tool from the FWTools suite,
> something like ogr2osm that will correctly convert my GIS to .osm?  I am
> guessing that even with such a tool, that I might have to edit/clean-up the
> .osm files a bit, but I assume there has to be many tools out there to do
> the bulk of the conversion...

Ivan said he'd help you with that. Ivan knows what he's doing.

> I truly appreciate all your kind help and assistance with this.  I don't
> know what I would do if it wasn't for you guys :)

It's our pleasure to help.

- Serge