Import/Catalogue/GNS Russia

Importing russian places from GNS

NGA GEOnet Names Server is public domain datasource that contains a huge amount of geographic names and coordinates

The datasource contains:

Towns/villages
Railway stations
Lake/reservoir names
Populated places have region membership data. Therefore rough region boundaries can be drawn.
Many other useful geonames

Unfortunately, there are no population information, performing following actions:

Most towns and largest villages were already imported from VMAP0. So default tag for populated places is place=hamlet
For all ADM2 if there was a populated place with the same name it was assumed that it is district center and probably should be marked as place=town
Using GNS data to correct existing data, especially populated places imported from VMAP0. There are some outdated place names and VMAP0 coordinates are very inaccurate.
Using Landsat data for revision of results and correcting place types
As the coordinates have relatively low resolution, some places shared the same point. In case of such duplication, both places are usually deleted.

The quality of the data is not very good but it should serve as scaffolding in this early stage of the map.