Informal Roads
Goals
This project aims to import informal roads primarily used by indigenous peoples in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia. Very little roads currently exist in OSM for this area.
Schedule
March 2024: Preparation of data and attempted discussions with OSM community in Russia.
June 2024: Preparation of import proposal in the wiki.
July 2024: Submission of import proposal to the imports@ list.
July 2024: Submission of import proposal to the talk-ru@ list
July 2024: Annotation in the Import Catalog.
July 2024: if no issues or concerns, Import will begin after the 2 week review period.
December 2024: Import end
Import Data
These data were created by students at the George Washington University to quantify informal road expansion and community impact as part of a community-engagement research project.
The data used for this import are Shapefiles that have been reprojected to WGS84. Features traced from imagery obtained from the Polar Geospatial Center (PGC) for the project supported by the National Science Foundation (award #1748092).
Background
Data source site: No website available. Extract of the shapefile containing the informal roads can be found here.
Data license: Permission granted via letter from the PGC under Part 1.d. The relevant segment from the letter is copied below:
"This United States Government Plus End User License Agreement (EULA) hereafter referred to
as “this Agreement” is an agreement between the United States Government (USG) (Licensee)
and the Contractor (Licensor). The EULA is incorporated into the Licensor’s contract (“the
Contract”) and is legally binding on the parties.
1. The following definitions apply to this Agreement:
1.a “Licensed Material” means the data, metadata, and products provided by the
Licensor that are delivered or otherwise made available for the Licensee’s
use as set forth in this Agreement. This term strictly applies to the forms,
formats, and other supporting data as received by the Licensee.
1.b “Licensed User” means an authorized recipient and end user of Licensed
Material according to Section 3 of this Agreement.
1.c “Value-Added Product” means a work that is created when a Licensed User
modifies Licensed Material—through technical manipulation, addition of
data, or both—where the principal features and characteristics of the source
Licensed Material are retained in the work and are extractable through
technical means. Value-Added Products created from Licensed Material
received under this Agreement are considered Licensed Material.
1.d “Derived Product” means a work that is created when a Licensed User
exploits Licensed Material in a manner that irreversibly modifies and
uncouples the work from its source, such that extraction of the principal
features and characteristics of the source Licensed Material is impracticable.
Derived Products are not considered Licensed Material."
Type of license (if applicable): CC-PDDC
ODbL Compliance verified: yes
Import Type
This is a one-time import, will be prepared manually and uploaded via JOSM.
Data Preparation
Data Reduction & Simplification
All data that already exists in OSM was removed. The import will be prepared manually, so information that is already contained in OSM will not be uploaded redundantly.
Tagging Plans
Tagging plan is done in accordance with the tagging schema put forth by OSM. Each highway classification in the import data will be mapped to an existing OSM highway tag.
| Shapefile attribute | OSM Tag (highway=*) |
| city_road | residential |
| L-clearing | track |
| oil_gas | service |
| other/unknown | unclassified |
| subsistence | track |
| forestry | track |
Changeset Tags
The following values will be used for each changeset created.
| Key | Value |
| comment | Import of informal roads |
| import | yes |
| source | George Washington University, Oleg Sizov and Viktor Bogdanov |
| source:date | July 2024 |
| import:page | https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Informal_Roads |
| source:license | CC-PDDC |
Data Transformation
JOSM tool Add nodes at intersections will be used to finish the data prep for import.
Data Transformation Results
Post a link to your OSM XML files.
Data Merge Workflow
Team Approach
Data preparation and import will be undertaken by experienced GIS data/OSM users from GWU using an import specific OSM user account (RAHinton_Import)
Workflow
- First, redundant road segments that already existed in OSM were removed from the dataset.
- Then the data were evaluated based on topological rules to correct for any issues such as self intersections or self overlaps. Many problematic line segments were identified using topology rules in ArcGIS and through visual inspection. Student researchers edited and fixed the roads so that they adhered to topological rules and reflected what is seen in the imagery.
- To be compatible with the OSM platform, the data were reprojected/transformed to WGS84 from UTM Zone 48N, WGS84
- Due to the large file size, the data were next parsed into smaller datasets based on attributes for import. Using JOSM, each smaller dataset will be imported manually one at a time to reduce processing time and the management of conflicts.
Conflation
- The dataset to be imported does not have any existing OSM roads. This was done using a buffer in ArcGIS Pro along with manual removal of roads that lined up with existing roads in OSM. This was to help avoid database collisions during import.
- Any road that was partially in OSM already was split so that only line segments that were entirely new would be imported.
- Any issue flagged during import will be manually addressed in JOSM
QA
Manual QA by JOSM Validation tool.