I’m trying to get the zoning district data for an American city and import it to create an overlay. Has anyone done this?
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I have “improved” a (badly-botched) import at a county-level of landuse polygons. (See our Santa Cruz County, California - OpenStreetMap Wiki). I’ve also “brought in” (it wasn’t an import, it was a “manual curation, one polygon at a time”) of landuse “boundaries” (which are in fact “named neighborhoods,” sprinkled among them are a few commercial and industrial districts) for the city of Santa Cruz.
I wouldn’t use the word “overlay” for either of these (and I’m not sure why you choose it), as these are straight-up landuse polygons. At a county-level, that’s a LOT of work, and it has been for many years to “keep up” (with updates as the County GIS publishes them). At a city-level, if the city is small (as is Santa Cruz), it might takes days-to-weeks-to-a-month-or-two, depending on your JOSM skills. (I wouldn’t do this with iD, use JOSM for such tasks, its relation editor is top-notch, and if you’re doing multipolygons, as you likely will, it’s much better for that task).
In the USA, the concept of “zoning” usually directly maps (logically speaking) to our landuse=* tag. There are some edge cases where, mmm, maybe not, but for the most part, yes.
You are welcome to PM me and I might answer additional questions you have.
And welcome to posting to Discourse!
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What is your use case? If you just want an overlay this might be possible in the display software without import.
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Sharpening focus on what I meant about landuse=* harmonizing with “zoning districts:” when you “stick to strictly three” (landuse=residential, landuse=commercial, landuse=industrial), it’s pretty solid cohesion of semantics between OSM’s definitions and “most municipalities” (let’s say, though it might be “city zoning” or might be “county zoning,” at least how we do things in the USA). Other landuse=* uses (it’s a very large key with a great many values) can go a bit fuzzy on their semantics in some contexts, so you best be especially careful beyond these “basic three.” This could extend to four if a line between commercial and retail is made less blurry (and it has been) so “three or maybe four.”
When you get to “less categorizable at a zoning level” with values like brownfield, cemetery, orchard, quarry, recreation_ground, vineyard… where these aren’t what some, most or many figure into what is meant by “zoning,” even if the idea of “land use” fits the semantic, it gets tricky or fuzzy. At least with what you have asked and how you have asked it; I’d also find it helpful if more of a use-case is described.
If what you mean by “overlay” is a of a sort we might characterize as a “one-off query” you might also be able to craft an Overpass query that does what you want, or acts as a seed to generate a next step in your existing or potential toolchain.
A use-case description does seem like it could move the ball closer to the goal. There may be ways to more-simply interpret existing OSM data rather than embedding new, specific data. (But, there are good use cases for doing either or both). So, I’m with @InsertUser here: “more, please.”