For some quick visualization with OSM data, Merkaator now can read shp files as well, but less options for the display.
Asking the GIS department about the data is generally the best way to find out about the data. As a general rule US local, state and national GIS data should be in the public domain due to... The freedom of information act I think, and the clasification of GIS data. A few places that have been selling the data have taken convincing via a lawsuit, but have so far lost. Usually it seems to be about parcel data. A possible exceptions is if the goverment licenced exisisting comercial data, rather than buying rights to it, or collecting it themselves. But that should be very rare. Also if the other conversion scripts are a bit hard to get working, take a look at Ian's shp-to-osm java app for converting. It is a lot less technical to use. http://redmine.yellowbkpk.com/projects/list_files/geo Dale On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 4:17 PM, Christopher Schmidt < crschm...@metacarta.com> wrote: > On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 07:38:03AM -0800, Spencer Riddile wrote: > > Christopher, > > > > I sent an email to the GIS Coordinator of Blacksburg to check whether the > data is public domain. > > > > Cool! Do you have your own hosted version of OSM and that is how you > were able to add the buildings? If I get permission to upload those other > layers, what method do you recommend? > > Nope. What I've done is: > * Set up Mapnik + OGC Server to serve a WMS. > * Opened qgis, a Desktop GIS Client. > * Added the OSM WMS > * Opened the map properties, checked the 'enable on the fly > transformation' checkbox > * Added the blacksburg, va "Buildings" layer. > * Export to PNG. > > (One of the things that people tned to fail to take into account in OSM > is that there are pretty great GIS visualization tools out there > already...) > > Using OSM tools, I'd recommend the 'polyshp2osm' tool in > http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/utils/import/shp2osm/ , but > you'll need some technical expertise to manage the conversion and the > upload. If you don't have any, there may be other people on this list > who could help with conversion and managing the upload. > > Regards, > -- > Christopher Schmidt > MetaCarta > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-us mailing list > Talk-us@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us > -- Dale Puch
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