User:Guenter
I'm Günter Neustädter. As I live in Arad, I am mapping Arad - for now just a few streets at a time. While I was in my home town Sighişoara last time, I have mapped most of it.
Looking for the first time at Romania on OSM some months ago, the map was quite empty. I expected at least the national boundaries. Only the border to Hungary was there, somehow imported from VMAP0, but I was unable to find how to do boundary import from VMAP0. So I searched for other ways to get the boundaries. First I found WDB. Using it was well documented at WikiProject_Import_WDB. It was a bit of guesswork to find the borders I was looking for, but in the end all went well. But, unfortunately, only the southern border was available.
Later I found geoSpatial.org. There was the data I wanted, but first I had no clue how to import it. The only downloadable format was ESRI Shapefile, which I didn't knew how to handle. After a bit of fiddling I found a way to use the WMS interface from JOSM, but initially the county borders were shown with the same colour as the background. I asked for help, and the guys at this site modified the colours, and pointed that there are converters from ESRI Shapefile to GPX. The obvious choice after googling, shp2gpx, was a false track, as the link is pointing to some other file and the maintainer newer answered. But I found shp2text. It was almost right. Josm was not liking the result, but using a text editor it was easy to modify these files to look like those generated by my GPS receiver. One difference remained. There were no timestamps, so it was not possible to upload the GPX to OSM. So I had to use JOSM. Another problem was the size of the file. It was quite big, so I used an editor to split the counties apart. Even one county was still quite big, so I divided the county boundary into several ways, at arbitrary points. And uploaded one county at a time from JOSM. Another difficulty was the fact that every county had a closed contour, so all inner boundaries were duplicated. I deleted these duplicates by hand.
As I did not knew which was more accurate, the boundaries from previous imports towards Hungary and Bulgaria were left intact, and the corresponding parts from geoSpatial.org deleted. --Guenter 18:20, 24 February 2008 (UTC)