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More accurate building outlines

0

Years ago, I manually drew most of the building outlines for the main campus of my employer, the University of Melbourne. The were OK for the time (aerial imagery wasn't very good back then), and have served well enough, however, we now use an mapping overlay that exposes many inaccuracies in that original data.

I now have access to accurate building outlines, and would like to explore a workflow that would allow me to replace my old manual edits with this shiny new geojson.

So, I have some questions:

  1. First one, obviously, is suggestions for a nice workflow - doesn't have to be fully automated, and want to avoid losing any other data/tagging that might have been added to these buildings in the past. So, I'm happy for the process to be semi automated, with manual oversight, as it were.
  2. I will have permission to use the data for this purpose, but what should I do to ensure that permission is recorded? I don't want someone in the future saying I shouldn't have done that, or questioning where the data came from.

asked 10 Nov '22, 04:16

woowoowoo's gravatar image

woowoowoo
190●6●7●14
accept rate: 0%

Regarding the second question: One of the steps in the Import Guidelines is documenting permission on the OSM wiki.

(16 Nov '22, 16:00) Tordanik

One Answer:

1

I am sure that there are ways of scripting this but if the project is relatively small, maybe less than a few hundred buildings, then I think JOSM and a couple of its plug-ins could be of use to you.

There is a feature called "Replace Geometry" which I think is part of the utilsplugin2 plug in. And the opendata plug in allows you to load things like shape files from a GIS system into a new layer.

  • Load the existing OSM data for the area.
  • Load the improved building data into a new layer.
  • Select a new/improved building outline in your new data layer and merge it into the OSM data layer.
  • Select the new and old outlines and then select "replace geometry"

The outline is now updated but has all the old history.

Rinse and repeat for each building.

answered 10 Nov '22, 15:59

n76's gravatar image

n76
10.8k●10●82●172
accept rate: 17%

You can use the todo pluin to step through the original buildings which will help organise the workflow.

(11 Nov '22, 15:11) SK53 ♦

Oh, yes. That sounds exactly the sort of thing I'm after. Going to test that asap - thanks so much. I'm not much of a JOSM user, so I'd never have worked that out.

(16 Nov '22, 06:24) woowoowoo