GeoJSON for states

This is a poor-man’s extension to https://github.com/ideditor/country-coder/issues/19. (Related: https://github.com/ideditor/country-coder/issues/26) Is it worthwhile to make simple GeoJSON shapes that “loose fit” states?

They would be useful for locationSet.include, but not really for exclude. I’m imagining something like

    {
      "displayName": "Some Regional Bus System",
      "locationSet": {
        "include": [
          "us-wa.lenient.geojson",
          "us-or.lenient.geojson",
          "us-id.lenient.geojson"
         ]
      },
      "tags": {
        "network": "Some Regional Bus System",
        "route": "bus"
      }
    },

It’d be really helpful, I imagine, for doing state police. Also, the country-code (text) search in NSI.guide would start working for locations tagged that way.

[bhousel]

Is there any performance gain / lose by including two or three single gps points as a location set, and letting locationConflation build an area from that? For example: 3-point radius … or would a “.geojson” still be preferable?

That’s very clever! I think a .geojson is still slightly preferable, just because it’s more clear what it is doing, but they’d both be fast approaches.

I did improve the performance of the unioning recently, and took this comparison screenshot: https://github.com/ideditor/location-conflation/issues/26#issuecomment-752344607 Basically, the biggest hit to performance is unioning a lot of things. (so, those locationSets where someone added like 20 countries to it). But even with that it performs well enough.

I’ve been adding this to iD the past few days, and it resolves them all in a few seconds. This means that for the first few seconds that iD starts up, a user won’t have these presets available yet.

In practice it’s surprisingly fast… The first time I tried it, I was planning to pay close attention to how long the task took. But iD showed me the “you have unsaved changes do you want to restore them” dialog box, and by the time I clicked “no” the background task had already completed! 😆

[jdcarls2]

I just ran into this when elaborating on a brand (Pinnacle Bank), and finding that there were in fact 2 bank brands in the US using this name, but in separate regions. Each bank’s website helpfully displays a map of the states that they serve, and this seemed like a great way to differentiate the locations.

Reading back through this issue, I have considerable QGIS experience with things like topological editing. The few state geojson files I have added were individually simplified features, but it wouldn’t be too much work to generate a file per state (or province, etc) with properly aligned features between each.

If there’s real interest in having these sorts of features, I could add them to my pull request sometime this week probably. (Or would it be a separate pull request or something? Apologies, it’s the first pull request I’ve done ever, and I’m still getting the hang of how Git works.)