Got the chance to do some hiking trail mapping last week, and am now in the process of figuring out how to properly draw/tag everything on OSM. Take a look at my latest traces and please let me know if I'm doing anything wrong!
OpenStreetMap
Got the chance to do some hiking trail mapping last week, and am now in the process of figuring out how to properly draw/tag everything on OSM. Take a look at my latest traces and please let me know if I'm doing anything wrong!
Discussion
Comment from Vincent de Phily on 5 May 2011 at 13:47
Have fun mapping trails ! They're quite rewarding, since you're often working in an area with very few existing data; even maps from the national maping authority are sometimes not great for trekking. For added fun, you can add 3 hours of off-track walk to your day just to add 500m of OSM-worthy highway=path (like I did last weekend) :)
Can't see anything wrong with the trace you linked to. When mapping trails, the most important tags I think are track/path, tracktype, sac_scale, and trail_visibility. Any shrine or ruins are also usefull to map. Have fun !
Comment from Harry Wood on 5 May 2011 at 13:51
Looks good. Keep up the hiking trail mapping. We like that!
You can probably drop a little detail from some of your trails data. I don't know if you're converting directly from GPS traces somehow, but you've got some weird kinks in your footpath. here for example (Not rendering yet, but do '+' and tick 'data' view)
There's other stuff we could add from aerial imagery here. You came to a viewpoint here which I can see is actually a big cliff, visible in bing imagery. So you could draw that in as a https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural=cliff way (or I could for that matter)
boundary of the landuse=forest is obviously not matching the actual boundary of the forest. It chould probably be shifted using bing, to loop around the visibly forested area. This data has been imported from some government source "NYDEC"? by RussNelson, so maybe represents some government designated area of forest (in which case it could perhaps remain in the current place with a different park boundary tag of some sort) That's a little confusing for new mappers. RussNelson will know more about it.
Comment from Alex-P on 5 May 2011 at 15:31
Thanks for the comments guys.
Yes, I do upload a GPS trace, then convert the whole thing to a way with P2 and then selectively edit out the junk (e.g. when I was dancing around too much because the "trail" was really a puddle)
I added the cliff way - tempted to consider this slightly over the top, but then again I like it when I realise my map has a high level of detail when I want it.
I'll look into the forest boundary stuff. That'll be a first as well, but I'm in learning mode now before the big trip (6 months cycling Chile) and I want to be proficient by then to make the most of the data I'll collect, given the time and tech gear constraints (Internet cafes only...)
Cheers!
Comment from compdude on 5 May 2011 at 17:13
I've wanted to do this for quite some time, but I'll need a GPS