On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 10:13 PM, Ivan Garcia <capisc...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > I recently discovered the site available by the US Army with millions of > world geonames (towns, etc) here > [1] http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm > > The OSM wiki says that there is no legal problem using it, altought we > should put the source tag > [2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SWDB#GEOnet_Names_Server > > Here is the XML explanations of the CVS that you can download from the link > [1], > [3] > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mass_content_adding/Geographic_data/Using_NGA_data/Localization/Description_of_Names_Files_for_Countries_and_Territories_Format/English > > The question is ? Anybody has developed a script to convert this CVS into a > KML or OSM file containing all the towns of a country? > This can be very useful for countries in developing countries almost empty.
They're called GNS files, if you search around the mailing lists you'll find some information about them, there's also a sparse page on the wiki: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/GNS Here's a program to convert them (somewhat) which I modified from another program I found on the wiki: http://git.nix.is/?p=avar/gns-to-osm;a=tree;h=master;hb=master git://git.nix.is/avar/gns-to-osm Here's an example of GNS (in)accuracy (originally from http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-is/2008-December/000053.html): OSM data now: http://flickr.com/photos/avarab/3133771125/sizes/o/ GNS data: http://flickr.com/photos/avarab/3133777841/sizes/o/ OSM and GNS data side by side: http://flickr.com/photos/avarab/3133764871/sizes/o/ As you can see the GNS data is prone to miss mountain peaks by a few kilometers, place farms in the middle of lakes and other "this was made by throwing darts at a globe" stuff like that. Things are generally pretty topographically correct, and can be useful in cases where you can move the nodes according to landsat data, local knowledge or other stuff like that. On my ever-expanding TODO list where nothing gets done I have a "write a viable user-powered GNS importer for OSM" item, basically: * Go through the entire GNS dataset and split it up by country/type of feature (e.g. one .osm file for peak, one for farms, one for glaciers etc.) * Present a web interface where users can download e.g. "peaks in Zimbabwe that haven't been uploaded" * The user will then open the .osm file in his editor, move nodes around according to local knowledge/landsat and upload them * The uploaded node will have a gns:UFI (unique feature ID) key and won't appear in the next extract of "peaks in Zimbabwe that haven't been uploaded" This (or something like it) is IMO the only non-sucky way to import GNS data, it has been imported as-is in some places like the Faroe Islands (which has no active mappers), but I wouldn't like a mass import of raw GNS data in any are which I edit, having a bunch of nodes which are off by few dozen meters to a few kilometers isn't acceptable quality for OSM. Especially for datasets such as these which you can merge with the OSM data on your own if you really want to use them. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
