Hi List,
Florida's 5 Water Management Districts map land cover for the entire
state. The data is provided in shapefile format. Florida has liberal
public records laws as described in Chapter 119 of the Florida Statutes.
Basically, all data (with a few exceptions) produced by state and local
governments in Florida is public domain.
Another OSM user and I are proposing to tackle manually importing water
derived from the land cover shapefiles produced by the Water Management
Districts. In addition, we will update coastlines. We would also like to
explore utilizing the wetlands and forest polygons from the land cover,
however, I know there are potential problems with shared polygon borders
and I'm not sure the best way to go about that.
I have seen a fair amount of NHD data that has been imported in parts of
Florida, and from what I have seen so far, the water polygons derived
from land cover are much more accurate, detailed, and up-to-date.
Some manual import work using this data has already been done, so partly
we're "coming clean". I have read the import guidelines and kept up with
this mailing list. In the past, I have subsetted out the water from the
land cover SHP by selecting it in ArcMap and exporting to a new
shapefile. Then used shp-to-osm to convert to OSM XML, loaded it into
JOSM, and then copy/pasted the ways into the main OSM layer. In the
past, I've tagged the ways with natural=water and source=SFWMD Land
Cover 2008 (or whatever WMD the source was). I now know that adding the
source tag to each way is not desirable and the source should be in the
changeset. I have also brought the sub-setted SHP directly into JOSM
and copied ways that way. I've often cleaned up the ways to improve the
quality of the linework and manually removed vertices. Some examples of
this work are in Martin County FL and Broward County FL. In addition, I
have used parts of ways to improve parts of the coastline that was
either unedited or poorly edited. Mainly in SW FL up to Tampa Bay.
The other person involved in this effort recently manually imported some
water polygons from the land cover, but left a lot of unnecessary tags
from the shapefile. We will work on cleaning these tags up. He is
involved with the OSM Tampa group and will be enlisting help from them
as well to clean up the recent issues and help with bringing in more data.
I have created an initial wiki page[1] and used the format and text from
the Seattle Import page as a guide.
So, the next steps are to further flesh out the wiki page detailing the
process, provide some sample OSM files for review, and discuss with the
US OSM community before we do any more importing. We would also welcome
any others who have an interest in helping out with the effort.
I want to stress that this will be a manual import consisting of loading
in the OSM file to JOSM and manually copy/pasting ways into OSM.
Additional linework editing will be done to improve the accuracy of the
ways based on Bing imagery.
Brian May, aka grouper
[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Florida_Land_Cover_Import
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