Talk:Kern County, California

Cleanup progress

http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/nmixter/diary/17501

I have begun cleaning up the area around Kern County, California. It is starting to not only look better but be less cluttered.

I originally imported landuse data from both Kern County and the City of Bakersfield. Some areas from these two agencies overlapped around Bakersfield, and I have been going through and trying to remove these. The city data were quite good and included landuse areas, buildings, parks and even individual trees within the city. The county data tended to be generic in several places. It also was slightly misaligned in spots particularly in the rural areas, possibly due to the projection it was created with by the county.

I have been going through and systematically deleting the redundant areas and breaking down the over used landuse=farm and landuse=residential tags into more specific areas. And in the process, I have been covering some of the ugly white space that has remained empty.

A lot of the areas are now natural=heath. There is not really any good way to differentiate between meadow and heath areas. Still seems like they can be used interchangeably sometimes. I've been trying to use meadow for an area that can be used for grazing. I just started using the heath tag for open areas generally on areas east of Highway 5. It's not a perfect option but at least it kind of matches the work others have done around Las Vegas and in the desert.

I've been trying to integrate the existing Kern County data with the FMMP farm data, which I have imported for other counties around the state as well.

If anyone is interested in helping out cleaning up Kern County or has any suggestions, feel free to jump in or let me know.