One-line summary: I want to import the boundaries of New York City
watershed recreation areas.
Side note: This project ties in closely with Paul Norman's
identification of a need to clean up the NYS DEC Lands import.
Many of the NYC DEP watershed lands share borders with the DEC lands,
and performing this import together with or after the DEC Lands
cleanup would yield a topology that is more nearly consistent. (Some
property lines simply are mapped inconsistently in the real world as
well as the digital world, so there will unavoidably be misalignment
of some parcels after the import.)
I welcome comments about any aspects of this proposal. I'm still new
to this game.
PROPOSED IMPORT:
New York City
Department of Environmental Protection
Bureau of Water Supply
Open Recreation Areas and Use Designations
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/pdf/recreation/open_rec_areas.pdf
1. OVERVIEW
New York City owns, and makes accessible for public recreational use
(activities such as hiking, fishing, hunting and trapping) about four
hundred parcels of land in the Catskill and Croton watersheds. All of
these lands are outside the boundaries of the city itself. The vast
majority of these parcels do not yet appear in OpenStreetMap. This
proposal is made to solicit community buy-in for the project of
importing multipolygons giving the boundaries of these reserves.
I expect that this import should be relatively non-controversial. The
data arise from an authoritative source - the agency that manages the
lands in question. They are readily obtainable in no other
way. Cadastre of public parks, nature reserves, and the like has been
imported many times before.
The import is of relatively small scale, comprising fewer than 400
multipolygons and associated tags. The total area of the parcels in
question is roughly 145 square miles (375 km**2).
2. LICENSING
I believe that the data are, by law, in the public domain under New
York City's open data access policy. The OSM community has relied on
ths policy in the past, most notably in the import of the New York
City address and building footprint data. The relevant paragraph is
in the Administrative Code of the City of New York, Chapter 5,
paragraph 23-502, subparagraph d. The text may be found at
http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doitt/downloads/pdf/nyc_open_data_tsm.pdf,
page 27. The data in question do appear on the single web portal
described in subparagraph a.
3. TECHNICAL DETAILS
The data in question consist of the PDF file
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/pdf/recreation/open_rec_areas.pdf, and the
PDF maps to which it links. I've successfully made a script to scrape
the tabular data from the PDF, resulting in a set of 367 distinct
unit names, together with the 'paa', 'hike', 'fish', 'hunt', 'trap'
and 'dua' columns, and the URL's of the corresponding maps.
These maps are all in PDF format. They are fully georeferenced, and
I've been able to work out GDAL scripts to extract the boundaries and
produce well-formed polygons from all but four of them. These four are
the "Day Use Areas" or "Designated Use Areas" (the web site fairly
consistently uses the former phrasing, the posters on the land use the
latter) of Devasego Park, the Ashokan fountains, and the Kensico and
Cross River dams. These are popular areas for walking and picnicking,
but are more of the nature of city parks than of nature reserves.
On the initial import I propose simply to ignore these four, leaving
363 recreation areas to import.
The proposed tagging is as follows:
leisure=nature_reserve
For the benefit of legacy renderers that do not yet comprehend
the details of boundary=protected_area
boundary=protected_area
protect_class=12
protection_object=water
Tailor-made for this data set!
operator='New York City, Department of Environmental Protection,
Bureau of Water Supply'
website=http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/recreation/index.shtml
name=(obtained from the 'unit' column of the list of sites, with
the word, 'Unit' postpended)
access=yes (if the 'PAA' column is 'Y') or access=license (if the
PAA column is 'N')
access:license=http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/watershed_protection/recreation.shtml
if (access=license)
access:hiking=(value of the 'hike' column, normalized to 'yes' or 'no')
access:fishing=(value of the 'hike' column, normalized to 'yes' or
'no')
access:hunting=(value of the 'hike' column, normalized to 'yes' or
'no')
access:trapping=(value of the 'trap' column, normalized to 'yes'
or 'no')
nycdep:version=MMDDHHMMSS
UTC time returned as Date-Modified from the web site. See
below for rationale of retaining this information.
I'm more than open to a different tagging scheme for 'access'. What
the relevant restrictions are:
PAA=Y areas are open to all comers, no p
