Author: mikel_maron[at]yahoo.com
[Added to the original trac issue at 12.25pm, Thursday, 15th December 2005]

GDAL/OGR is an open source library that can translate between many geospatial data formats. OGR handles vector formats, and can read/write shapefiles.

http://www.remotesensing.org/gdal/

There are a number of command line utilities included, which could be called from Ruby/Java/etc.

Author: richard[at]systemeD.net
[Added to the original trac issue at 12.27pm, Thursday, 15th December 2005]

The ESRI PDF is the reference I've used when parsing shapefiles before. It's a fairly basic file format (as long as you get the byte order right, of course). Never done it in Java or Ruby, I'm afraid, only Perl.

Remember that ESRI concepts won't necessarily translate directly into OSM's data model. For example, you can have polygons with 'holes' (e.g. for built-up areas containing green space). To begin with, it may be most sensible only to import a subset of the shapefile data - probably just polylines.

In so far as one can generalise, shapefiles are probably more likely to contain copyrighted data than GPX files are. I'd therefore suggest that the warning about "don't submit any copyrighted data" is amplified for this feature.

Author: stevens
[Added to the original trac issue at 2.29am, Tuesday, 23rd August 2011]

Closing as WONTFIX.
A system that automatically takes a shapefile and imports it into the OSM database would not comply with the import guidelines.