I've done my first import! Now on OpenStreetMap: the military establishments of southern New Mexico (USA), far west Texas, and the Tularosa Basin.

The areas I've imported:

• White Sands Missile Range


• Fort Bliss, including the sub-ranges:
  
  • Fort Bliss Castner Range
  
  
  • Fort Bliss McGregor Range


• Holloman Air Force Base


• San Andres National Wildlife Refuse (not a military installation, but within WSMR)

For those not in the know, White Sands Missile Range is home to many harbinger-of-the-end-of-the-world type events, including the location of the Trinity Site, where the world's first atomic weapon was detonated (yes, I've plans to map that next).

Nestled within these installations is White Sands National Monument, whose boundaries on OpenStreetMap are unfortunately wrong (see my previous post about the inaccurate federal lands shapefile).

An interesting note to make about WSMR: the boundaries I've imported into OSM reflect the area occupied by the military-owned area and "call-up areas." These call-up areas, of which there is a northern and two western portions, are land owned by private, state, and other federal agencies that can be evacuated in 12 hours. Most other maps do not reflect these areas, and work-to-do involves finding their boundaries and better tagging them.

The area taken by these military facilities is huge. Such that OpenStreetMap/Mapnik do not render them at an encompassing zoom level (should I file a rendering bug for this?).

Because these areas overlap each other, I used ogr2osm to convert TIGER2009 boundary shapefiles to the OpenStreetMap format with relations, which I carefully (after several failed attempts with Merkaartor) cleaned up and tagged (to the best of my ability) with JOSM.