Importing shape files to JOSM

General talk
1

In my meandering around the net, I discovered that the State of Florida has a shape file (or set of files) that define the PLSS for Florida. I see that JOSM has a plugin (OpenData) that supports shape files.

ftp://data.labins.org/PLSS_download/

I have no intention or desire to upload that to the OSM repository. It is possible to load that into a JOSM layer, to obtain various corner points and shapes ? (obviously without loading into the main editing layer)

2

The idea to use external data in JOSM is first to download some data in the area of interest, then open the external data in another layer. I don’t know if the plugin supports opening the data in new layer though.

Some variation of OGR2OSM http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ogr2osm should do a raw conversion. Then in JOSM this file can be opened after first downloading data in the area of interest.