For non-Americans, or non-hikers, the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) is a 2,650 miles (4,265 km) long trail route that runs from the Mexico border in California all the way up to the Canadian border in Washington.
There's a pretty high detail ShapeFile for the whole thing at the US Forest Service page devoted to the trail: http://www.fs.fed.us/pct/ http://www.fs.fed.us/pct/downloads/PCT_shapefile.zip Using the Merkaartor editor, I've looked at the data overlapped on the OSM, and at least at first pass, it doesn't seem like much of it is already in the OSM. Should I import it, and if so, how? Here's the issues as I see them. First, the PCT is clearly a relation, not just a path. But all we have is the data of where it goes, not what roads, tracks, and paths it's following. Second, the shapefile doesn't give hint of what type of road/track/path it is, so in sections where the road/track/path is missing, it seems like we'll need to first add some paths (tagged with highway=road ?), then add those paths to the Pacific Crest Trail relation. I think the proper solution is probably to write a script that creates a relation, then traverses the PCT looking for existing 'highway' tagged ways nearby, adding them to the relation if found. If no appropriate way is found nearby, then create a highway=road tagged way from the shapefile data. I'm a programmer, and would be willing to try it myself, but since I currently know nothing about OSM's API, and relatively little about it's standard practices, the potential for me to mess it up is a little intimidating. Is there a sandbox to play in? For that matter, what's a good algorithm for calculating if two ways are 'close', favoring longer ways, and strongly favoring groups of ways which are close to the shapefile data AND which are connected to each other? Is that the right way to be thinking about it? Is there a wiki page that talks about how to avoid importing overlapping data? And last question, is anyone else interested in taking the data and running with it? Cheers, - Dan _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
