Experience during the generation of NM topo

[steffen]

First of all thank you for your great tutorial!!!

I am almost done with New Mexico. Due to heavy naming issues (spanish characters in many geo names) I was not able to use the PostgreSQL/Postgis for the NHD's, transportation and NGIS. The generaton of the sql files was successful, but I got tons of errors while putting those data into the db. Therefore I had to find other solutions, which was really difficult due to the huge amount of polygones, lines etc. The ngis POIs coming from USGS are in very poor quality (at least for New Mexico)! A lot of them had the same coordinates, others are using 0000000N and 0000000W, or they occour twice (e.g. La Ventana Arch). It tooks quite a long time to fix most of those things. Here are some additions/corrections for your tutorial:

1. The setup procedure for PostgreSQL/Postgis does not work for me. I had to install the db as a service, otherwise I had no configuration files, like pg_hba_conf... and I can't start the service of course

2. Instead of using the forest data from FSGeodata Clearinghouse, I took the data from here: http://www.fs.fed.us/r3/gis/datasets.shtml The Clearinghouse data does not contain a .prj file nor trail and road names. The USFS data comes with all of them.

3. The US Fish & Wildlife Service http://www.fws.gov/data/statdata/index.html provides GIS for NWRs which could be useful as well

4. I also add urban data (current place) coming from Tiger

5. the border data in new_mexico.xls is not correct, south should be 31

6. tweaking POI data, e.g. seperate MP_TYPE for big cities...

7. ...

Best Regards,
Steffen

[-Oz-]

I wish I had known you were doing New Mexico.  I am just waiting for the last water data to be emailed to me.

I will correct the tutorial with your advice and fix the new_mexico file.

For number 6, does the tiger data include populations or city sizes?

I find it odd that the GNIS thing didn't work since it did for me; maybe I'm missing a lot of points which is definitely something I will look into.

Is your map all compiled?

[steffen]

I got an old tiger file from 2000. This one contains population data. But those informations are also available here (for the whole US): http://www.citypopulation.de/USA-NewMexico.html

I finished all the preparation steps. Compiling the data will be the next one.

[-Oz-]

Well, I updated all the excel sheets tonight there were quite a few with that calculation error.

I also started working on the GNIS program to handle the accents but visual basic doesn't like them.

[steffen]

You should adapt your template file (dictionary_header.mp) to LBLcoding=9 and Codepage=1252. Otherwise all spanish accents will be replaced: "Ñ" --> "-"