CoRE Stack Import Proposal Review: Hydrology Boundaries for India - India - OpenStreetMap Community Forum

CoRE Stack Import Proposal Review: Hydrology Boundaries for India - India - OpenStreetMap Community Forum
CoRE Stack Import Proposal Review: Hydrology Boundaries for India
Communities
India
wikidata
wiki-proposal
india
editors
import-proposal
data
Sweety_Kumar
(Sweety Kumar)
April 15, 2026, 10:48am
Hello everyone,
We are students from IIT Delhi - Sweety Kumar and Devanshi Malik (
@Devanshi_Malik
), working under the guidance of Prof. Aaditeshwar Seth (
@aaditeshwar_seth
), on importing data from CoRE Stack, a rich environmental and ecological dataset for India, into OpenStreetMap.
As OpenStreetMap provides administrative boundaries such as countries, states, and districts, we are developing similar datasets for hydrology related spatial units, including watersheds, micro-watersheds, waterbodies and related layers. Some of these datasets are currently hosted on Google Earth Engine and are accessible through the CoRE Stack platform (
Our objective is to contribute these datasets to OpenStreetMap through the proper import process. We believe this can help make the data more accessible to a wider community, enable collaborative improvement and support useful analyses through tools such as Overpass API, including watershed relationships, drainage connectivity, waterbodies within watersheds and related use cases.
We have prepared a detailed import documentation outlining the project scope, data sources, methodology, quality assurance process, workflow, and compliance plan. We have also made the associated code publicly available for transparency and review.
Documentation:
Import/Catalogue/CoREStack to OSM - OpenStreetMap Wiki
GitHub Repository:
GitHub - lmaokisnotcute-4-lbhai/OSM_corestack: OSM import pipeline and documentation for integrating CoRE Stack watershed data into OpenStreetMap · GitHub
We would sincerely appreciate feedback, suggestions and guidance from the OSM India community before proceeding further.
Thank you.
Taya_S
(Taya Snijder)
April 15, 2026, 11:38am
Hello,
Could you please add the link to the explicit permission you mention? As mentioned
here
CC-BY 4.0 is not inherently compatible with ODbL.
Your methodology of uploading data using the raw OSM API instead of common well tested tools such as JOSM is highly discouraged and prone to errors. Please don’t use custom scripts when you don’t need to. In fact, looking at your
earlier import attempts
and your
code
, you always create a relation with a singular way as ember. You also never reuse nodes you’ve previously added, even if two boundaries are next to eachother and the nodes share the exact same coordinates. Why not just split all these ways up into reusable segments like virtually all boundaries on OSM? Why not reuse nodes? I don’t believe you should be using some custom script for this. Regular JOSM should suffice. A lot of this code also seems AI generated, so how can we trust that you know what you are doing with regards to this import and OSM in general?
Please do not create a wiki page for every single object you upload. There is no reason to do this. Those examples you provided
and
are completely meaningless to anyone visiting the page. Creating these is just unwanted spam.
The tags you list are incomplete. You’re suggesting basically just 4 OSM tags, one of which is deprecated and should instead be used on changesets, not on objects. Just having a tag with
type=boundary + source=https://core-stack.org/
doesn’t mean much.
I’m also not sure about the wikipedia tags you added
here
as that page is not about a watershed. Could you give us an example of microwatersheds you intend to add that already have their own wikipedia page?
(Edit: I see now that you want to add
wikipedia tags that link to the OSM wiki

, this is not how the wikipedia tag works. And again, please don’t create OSM wiki pages to represent objects on the map. That is not what it is used for)
The CoRE-Specific Tags you mention seem unneccecary to me, if this is just a one-time import, then these tags are not needed. Maybe a single ref at most. It is also unclear how eactly you want to tag things. You mention those 3 tags (
core_entity
core_id
core_updated
) specifically, but then start talking about a
core:
namespace?
In your previous import attempt, I found the geometry you added to be highly dubious. Firstly, it was incredibly blocky, but more importantly, the data does not seem to correspond to anything verifiable on the ground? A lot of your boundaries randomly cross rivers or seem arbitrary in nature. Could you exlain what exactly ‘microwatersheds’ are, and how one could verify those?
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