On 05/19/2016 05:27 AM, Paul Norman wrote:
I was debugging some MP issues and came across the NYSDEClands import[1], done in 2010, consisting of natural areas. They have a number of unwanted tags[2], and a couple of other problems with their tags

Because there's a relatively small number of them, I think a mechanical edit is the best cleanup option. I'm proposing the following

- Removing NYDEC_Land:* tags
- Removing area=yes where there are other area tags
- Changing url=* to website=* where website does not already exist
- Leaving source=* intact
- Removing name=Unclassified

[1]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/NYSDEClands
[2]: e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/32002190

_______________________________________________
Imports mailing list
impo...@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports

You are talking about an import that is near and dear to me: this is my home turf!

This import needs more significant rework than what you propose, and in fact, I wrote to Russ privately just the other day about it.

There's no update plan, although the source shapefile is updated regularly.

Multipolygons were rather a botch in the original import (for instance, most of Saranac Lake Wild Forest is missing (something I just recently noticed). The same thing had happened to Indian Lake Wilderness and Overlook Mountain Wild Forest. Some of the multipolygons have topological problems.

Nodes are duplicated all over the place. Whenever I touch one of these areas (usually to disconnnect a way) it triggers a cascade of JOSM warnings.

Wildlife management areas are tagged merely with 'landuse=conservation', which is deprecated and does not render. They should be something more like 'leisure=nature_reserve boundary=protected_area protect_class=4', like the Pennsylvania State Game Lands. I would entertain an argument for a different protection class, maybe 14?

Wildlife management areas and multiple use areas have 'Wma' and 'Mua' in their names, which needs to be spelt out or at least capitalized.

The only real reason that I hadn't done it yet is that I'm trying to work up an update plan. I'm a good enough hand with PostGIS that I have a pretty good idea how to come up with the list of differences when a new version of the shapefile appears. But I'm ignorant of the tools for mechanical edits, and so it's been slow going. I'm quite meticulous about these things.

If you're willing, I think your time might be better spent on teaching me how to do the import.

That would have the pleasant side effect that I'd be able to do http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/pdf/recreation/open_rec_areas.pdf by myself. I'm going to ask for the shapefile when I ask NYCDEP for permission. This is done out of a superabundance of caution, since permission should not be needed in any case. New York City's open data policy covers this data set, and we've done a good many other imports relying on the policy. If need be, I have scripts that have successfully web-scraped the individual maps for all of the areas except for Devasego Park in Greene County, the Ashokan day use area in Ulster County, and the Cross River and Kensico dams in Westchester County. The PDF maps for those four areas are images only - there's no vector polygon in them to be scraped. They're tiny compared with the others - more like city parks, while the others are huge tracts of mountain, forest and marsh.

Learning how to do this sort of job would also let me make faster progress toward getting the Adirondack waterways sorted. That's a much harder database job - it's a multiway conflation among what's already in there (a quasi-mechanical import of ponds, plus satellite image tracing of a handful of major rivers), NHD, the Adirondack wetland database, the USFWS wetland database, and the NYSDOT water shapefiles. Every single one of these has major errors and omissions, but conflating the redundant coverage actually promises to yield something fairly clean.

Generally speaking, survey quality in these areas is extremely poor. I'd say that the first topographic maps of the Adirondacks that were made to even the standards of the Victorian era were the ones produced in the 1980s for the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. And most online topographic map services don't even include them, because they were in metric units, used UTM rather than the state plane coordinate system, were referenced to NAD83 rather than NAD27, and were at 1:25000 rather than 1:24000 scale. They also were printed on rather poor paper, and shipped folded rather than rolled in mailing tubes. Because of that, no libraries have copies that really lie flat for scanning. They were huge sheets, since they were 7.5x15 minute double quads rather than 7.5x7.5. For that reason, a lot of their information simply never got digitized (or digitized well). A lot of the National Map stuff, NHD, and so on are actually based on the 1953 survey instead.

Those for whom a mechanical edit is never good enough will wait a very long time to get anything better in the Adirondacks and Catskills. I'm all for cleaning the state land boundaries up, since it establlishes a pipeline for authoritative data from the agency that manages the land in question. I realize that Frederik would say that if OSM isn't the authoritative original source, then the data don't belong in OSM. Whatever one believes about that, the import is already done and we might as well make the best of it.

--
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin


_______________________________________________
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Reply via email to