Import Shapefile data to improve coastline

Hi OSM community,

I have just created an account and have set about correcting many mistakes in road names and infrastructure in my local area, I am a GIS Officer so this realm is not exactly new. The coastline is woeful and rather than digitise the area can I import a very detailed shapefile instead. The data has been created by me so there is no licence or copyright issues.
Thanks…

As far as possible you should not delete and re-add, so you should try to retain the existing ways, at least, although, if your data is particularly dense you may be forced to split them because of the limits on the numbers of nodes in any one way.

I don’t know what tools are available to convert a shapefile to a sequence of coordinates and merge those into an OSM way. However, the OSM XML syntax is not complex, and it should not be that difficult to do from first principles.

You should be aware that the coastline get special processing, so changes may not show up in the rendered versions of the map as quickly as inland changes do.

Are you sure you own the database rights?. If you work professionally in this area, any work you do in office hours will be work for hire and the copyright you will owned by your employer. Also, in many countries, and many US states, work done using your day job skills, but out of hours, is still considered work for hire for copyright purposes.

JOSM with the OpenData plugin will read shapefiles directly. Load shapefile into one layer, load existing OSM data into another, then copy-and-paste as needed.

But the OP may already know that. :slight_smile:

Excellent, great to have you on board.

Coastline fixup is one of the harder things in OSM, because if it goes wrong, the polygons are broken and the world floods! So it’s probably easiest to find your local community and ask them to work with you on this - whereabouts are you?

Thank you all for the feedback,

I hadn’t considered the point made by ‘hadw’ in regards to my employer owning the IP, even if much of the coastline was made at home in my own time…something I will have to investigate.

I am in Central Queensland, the mainland is actually represented quite well in my area however the major islands sitting just off the coast could do with some work. Thanks Richard I will reach out to the local community for assistance.

Thanks again :slight_smile:

And what is the source of this coastline data? Where did you get the base data from?

Some maps? Some old maps? Satellite images? Own GPS tracks. Other’s GPS tracks? other?

Regards
walter