[OSM-talk] Update of international borders

Michael Krämer ohrosm at googlemail.com
Fri Nov 18 17:09:26 GMT 2011


Hello,

a while ago I had read the announcement about a new dataset for
internations borders being available from the US Department of State
[1]. So I started updating the boders of DR Congo where necessary and
also the border between Sudan and South Sudan. There I noticed that
the adjacent borders to Ethiopia are currently not as detailed as
those in the new dataset.

After giving some consideration I think it is a good idea to update
the borders where necessary. I think that's typically the case where
the current border origins from the CIA WDB [2]. As an example look at
[3] - the current border is quite different from the river while the
DoS data is coincident.

I worked a bit with QGIS to split the original dataset into separate
segements for each border between two countries. The process to
convert those into osm files is also working fine.

The most challenging part of course is to import the data and adjust
all sub-boundaries and relations again. This requires quite a bit of
manual work. For this an automatic import is not a good idea.

But if anyone else is interested in working with the data I am happy
to share them, of course. In this case I would probably create an wiki
page to coordinate efforts. Also I guess I would somehow have to
organize the data into manageable collections - all in all I currently
have over 500 segments.

Michael

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potential_Datasources#US_Dept._of_State.2C_International_Boundaries
[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potential_Datasources#The_CIA_World_DataBank
[3] http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=8.456&lon=33.456&zoom=11&layers=M



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