There've been several discussions on converting shapefile data form local governments to OSM. Like Ian, I've been hacking around with Python looking to convert local county data to OSM. So, I wanted to start a separate thread to discuss the process. Here it goes...
First of all, it seems that a generic Shapefile-to-OSM script is impossible to write without writing a conversion application around it. The reason I say this is because shapefile feature attributes are set by whoever is compiling the data, and they are probably quite different between counties/locations. For example, my county's street centerline data has attributes like "STNAME", "STYPE", "DIR_SUF", etc. Some other county's data will have completed different names. Seems to me that this makes it impossible to automate the task of mapping Shapefile attributes to OSM tags. The conversion script user would have to specify this mapping. Is that right? The other issue I suspect is that the conversion process would be different for street centerline data versus, say, police station location or parks and recreation areas. Street centerline data is stored as a PolyLine shape type in the Shapefile, while police station locations are Points, and parks are Polygons. Is that right? I am not saying that it is not possible to write a fairly complete application to analyze the shape file and present the user with choices for mapping feature attributes to OSM tags. I just want to get others' views on the issues involved in a conversion script. One more point... Can anyone comment on advantages/dissadvantages of adding an OSM export plugin for something like MapWindow<http://www.mapwindow.org/>, QGIS <http://www.qgis.org/>, Mapnik <http://mapnik.org/>or some other GIS application? Victor
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