Determine how to represent non-municipal boundaries

[waldoj]

The physical boundaries of hunting seasons do not always respect municipal boundaries.

For instance, I-95 and I-81 are dividing lines for some hunting seasons. For example, firearms bear seasons:

Most municipalities neatly fall into a given season, but Washington, Smyth, Wythe, Pulaski, and Montgomery are divided up into 1–2 seasons.

We don't always have landmarks like highways to fall back on, either. Here's the bear hound training/chase season map:

I have no idea of what's going on in Pittsylvania and Campbell.

Realistically, we're going to need GIS data to represent these. But there's got to be actionable information to fall back on for folks who can't parse GIS. Perhaps municipalities are defined as "definite" or "split." Split municipalities can have a textual description of the boundary ("the Blue Ridge," "I-95," etc.), when that's feasible. And, of course, split municipalities have GIS data, to provide absolute certainty.

[waldoj]

I wonder if the agency has any GIS data, or if they're just working with images here? If they have GIS data, that might solve this. We could convert those files into GeoJSON, and embed that data.

[waldoj]

The more I get into some of these descriptions, the more I think that geodata is going to need to be our primary method of demarcating boundaries, with textual descriptions for convenience. We may even, within the documentation, say that user agents that are providing geographic data "must" be able to handle the GeoJSON and "may" use the shorthand text, but not to present it as the final word on geo boundaries. So for the above map, we can list a bunch of municipalities that allow hunting within the defined period (Mecklenburg, Brunswick, Dinwiddie, etc.), and then list a bunch more municipalities that allow them only in some areas (Pittsylvania and Campbell). That's probably convenient for user agents and for hobbyists who are using the data only for themselves or for purposes that aren't particularly geographically bound. Knowing how to handle geodata is a high hurdle, after all.

[davidmurr]

I have no idea of what's going on in Pittsylvania and Campbell.

IIRC, the split in these two counties is along Rt. 29.

I tend to agree with your thoughts here and am checking with our GIS folks to see if this kind of data is something they have readily available. I believe these maps were drawn by "hand" though.

I've been wondering how exceptions within a locality can be best represented. For example, if hunting during a particular season is allowed only on private lands, or only on Wildlife Management Areas, National Forest lands, etc., is there a practical way to represent that outside of narrative text? Or do you see that as outside of the scope of this particular issue?

[waldoj]

I believe these maps were drawn by "hand" though.

Ruh-roh. OK. Looks like some exploration about the existence of geodata is going to be necessary.

I've been wondering how exceptions within a locality can be best represented. For example, if hunting during a particular season is allowed only on private lands, or only on Wildlife Management Areas, National Forest lands, etc., is there a practical way to represent that outside of narrative text?

I'm optimistic that we'll be able to represent that when we get to that point (which is, IMHO, within the scope of this issue). If geodata exists, then the point is...well, not mooted, but less problematic. If there's geodata, I think it's reasonably to say, within the spec "geodata is the authoritative source—textual descriptions are only for user agent convenience." If there's not geodata, I still think this is resolvable without resorting to prose.

[waldoj]

It's also possible that we could create geodata, assuming that there's a simple, open, free process that would support it. Imagine, for instance, that one could select each of the municipalities, and then trace a line down Route 29 (with some sort of snap-to-road feature enabled), and export that as GeoJSON. I don't know if that's a thing, but there's a fantasy scenario in which the creation of geodata (where otherwise only raster maps would exist) could be plausible.

[waldoj]

It does exist! I asked @feomike about it, and he pointed out that @tmcw had created precisely the service that I'm looking for—GeoJSON.io. I'll play with it and see if it'll do the trick, but it looks nice.

[waldoj]

There are two problems that, while not deal-breakers, are problematic. The first is that this tool doesn't display county boundaries. The second is that it has no snap-to-boundary or snap-to-feature functionality, so tracing the edge of a county or a highway is pretty tricky. That said, it can open data files, not just generate them, so it's possible that we could start with a base map and modify it.

This seems like a laborious method of producing all of the maps that we need to produce, but it would work. The good news is that creating them would be laborious, but maintaining them would not be.

[tmcw]

The second is that it has no snap-to-boundary or snap-to-feature functionality, so tracing the edge of a county or a highway is pretty tricky.

Is this for a custom datasource, or OSM? Snapping to / grabbing data from OSM isn't currently part of the goal because of, erm, the 'sharealike thing'

If you do want to do that, you can run an overpass turbo query and export some osm into geojson.io

[waldoj]

Here's a GitHub repository of county boundaries as GeoJSON, which is really helpful. The catch is that they're oversimplified, to the point at which I they're going to be misleading, but surely somebody has produced a collection that's a little less smoothed.

Thank you, @tmcw! In the realm of mapping, don't even know what I don't know, but I'll read up on that. :) I'm just trying to figure out how to render as GeoJSON geographic boundaries that tend to adhere to boundaries like highways (e.g., the eastern half of a county, with I-95 serving as the dividing line). I'm pretty sure that I can build that up by importing the county file, and then manually removing the portion west of I-95. I'll figure it out. :)

[waldoj]

I've gotten started on encoding place-specific data with ca6d373.

[waldoj]

I tend to agree with your thoughts here and am checking with our GIS folks to see if this kind of data is something they have readily available.

@davidmurr, have you gotten a response on that? If GIS data of non-municipal boundaries isn't available, things will get complicated. :-/

[davidmurr]

@waldoj: getting to the bottom of this has been more complicated than I'd hoped, but I'm expecting to get a definitive answer by next week.

I suspect that boundaries for military lands and USACE lands may not be available, at least through us. Other than those, does this list cover everything (aside from municipal) we'd like to have geodata/boundaries for? Just want to make sure I'm not leaving anything out of my request.

• DGIF Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs)
• Public Access Lands for Sportsmen (PALS)
• state parks
• state forests
• national forests
• national parks
• federal refuges

[waldoj]

That is everything that I know of, though of course I'd defer to you in this! Thanks for digging around on this, @davidmurr—funny how simple things like this can turn out to be strangely complicated.

[waldoj]

I've been able to harvest some goedata from the DGIF site, convert it to GeoJSON, and add it to the repository, per #27. So far it's just WMAs and public fishing lakes, but that's a great start.

[waldoj]

It's been determined—human-readable descriptions and GeoJSON. Resolved.