OpenStreetMap
Recently I edited a GNIS feature that hadn’t been touched since import. You know the kind: a node, sometimes placed wildly distant from the feature’s actual location, with tags like gnis:feature_id and all that. In this case, the node was in the right place but its name was wrong (“Oatil Cemetery” should have been “Datil Cemetery”).
As I have generally done in the past, I sent a correction to the GNIS manager, a US government employee whose job is to maintain the dataset. Typically they have been pretty responsive to making these changes. To my surprise, this time I got a response saying they no longer accept changes by email. Instead, they allow certain classes of objects to be edited directly by users!
It turns out that the USGS provides a hosted copy of Potlatch 2, where ordinary users can create or edit the placement, name, and address of a few kinds of features:
- Schools
- Universities
- Fire/EMS stations
- Police stations
- Prisons
- State Capitols
- Hospitals
- Ambulance services
- Cemeteries
- Post offices
In the future, I’ll correct the names and addresses of these in GNIS or add them whenever I encounter one that doesn’t exist in the dataset. (When I encounter them in real life, that is. Unfortunately, OpenStreetMap’s licensing is such that I don’t think I can add features or address data directly from OpenStreetMap to GNIS.) I’ll also add the feature IDs to OpenStreetMap with gnis:feature_id, in hopes that we can greater synchronize the datasets as they become updated.
It’s really great to see my own government making use of free software to provide infrastructure to improve public domain data.