Friends,
following our (me and talkat) previous meetings with representatives of Keren Kayemet LeIsrael,
it is my pleasure to announce that KKL is making available for OSM the following two datasets which will no doubt enhance our map:
- KKL-managed forest boundaries. Overall 277 polygons/multipolygons.
- Public KKL sites such as camping/picnic/archaeologocical/recreational. Overall 1157 interest points.
The coverage includes all of Israel except most of the areas beyond 1949 armistice line.
Before the import, I still need to receive the final OK from KKL regarding issues concerning liability and credit, so please do not add anything to OSM yet.
The original archive with all the data is available here :
http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~dmitryb/kkl/KKL_GIS.zip
The quickest way to look at the data is probaly through a Shapefile viewer such as Quantum GIS.
I’ve already converted the forest layer into OSM format (using http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ogr2osm), available here (again, please do not upload anything yet):
http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~dmitryb/kkl/forests.osm.7z
The file is pretty big for JOSM/Merkaartor on my netbook, so I am thinking to divide the whole thing into chunks of manageable size (say, 30 forests in each).
I currently added to every polygon/multipolygon the following tags:
name: the forest name
kkl:forest_num - the field FOR_NO, will be useful for future updates
kkl:update_date - the field UPDATE_DAT
source: KKL
It appears that the conversion script has some problems, as there are ways not tagged with anything.
I didn’t have time to look into the second dataset yet, it will no doubt be more tricky to convert as there is much more variability in the data.
There are duplicates/overlaps with existing OSM data. Therefore we need to carefully decide how to proceed with the import.
I cannot fully dedicate right now to this project, so any help will be appreciated.
dimka