Spartanburg County Cell Tower Import

Spartanburg county cell tower import

About

This page is intended to document plans for an upcoming import of Cellular towers provided by the Spartanburg county GIS department.

The plan is to follow the import checklist:

• Identify data to import
• Translate, tag, and otherwise tenderize the data
• Do the work: Import/merge the data
• QA the data

Goals

Add towers that have not been previously observed on a survey, Verify tower positions on imagery, merge additional tags with existing towers

Schedule

This work will take place within a month after a 2 week review period.

Background

Data has been received from the county GIS office and converted. OSM-formatted data may be observed at https://github.com/OpenStreetMapSC/SpartanburgCellTowers-2018/tree/master/OSMData

Type of license: Public domain, and also an email has been obtained from the GIS office granting permission for OpenStreetMap to use the data.

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August 24, 2018 3:38 PM

Spartanburg County data is not copyrighted. Because it is created with taxpayer money, when we distribute the data it is offered without restrictions.

Bill Porter, Sr. GIS Analyst 864 596 3257 GIS Addressing / Spartanburg County 366 N Church St

Spartanburg, SC 29303

Import Type

This is a one-time import, done with JOSM. In the future, re-converting data and taking a text file diff could highlight towers that have since been added or removed.

Data Preparation

Data was converted from the supplied shapefiles using the OGR2OSM scripts, along a filter to check and convert tags. Script is at https://github.com/OpenStreetMapSC/SpartanburgCellTowers-2018/tree/master/conversionScripts , which also documents tag conversion.

Data Merge Workflow

Team Approach

The dedicated accounts to be used for the import are named Spartanburg_SC_County_Import1 and Spartanburg_SC_County_Import2. Overall data is stored in the combined file cellTowers.osm at https://github.com/OpenStreetMapSC/SpartanburgCellTowers-2018/tree/master/OSMData . The data has been divided into smaller work chunks as cellTowerSquare*.osm.

Workflow

1. Open JOSM, ensuring that the active user is one of the import accounts above.
2. Open one of the squares
3. Download OSM data for that square
4. Turn on newest / most accurate imagery. Generally this will be Bing / Mapbox for this county.
5. For each tower, locate the tower in imagery. Move the node to the base of the tower. Some nodes of the source data are positioned at the center of the parcel rather than on the tower. Some are positioned at the main building for the parcel. If the tower cannot be located in imagery, delete the new node and add a map note to survey for tower in the future.
6. If there is an existing tower in OSM, merge any new tags on the existing tower and delete the new node. (CTRL+C 'Copy' from new node, CTRL+SHIFT+V / 'Paste Tags' on existing node).
7. Remove Fixme tag. Fixme tag is intentionally mis-formatted to trigger a warning on upload. This is to help track which of the new nodes in the square have been inspected. Do not upload with fixme tag still intact.
8. Upload data - there must not be any warnings on upload.