[Talk-us] National Forest trail numbering

[Samat K Jain]

I'm want to do an import of the trail system in various National Forests in New 
Mexico, starting with the Lincoln National Forest. One thing in the Forest 
Service shapefiles I want to make part of the import is trail numbering.

However, I haven't found much information on how this is done for National 
Forests in the USA. The wiki page (see below) mentions route_no= and trail_no=, 
but there's no other mention of these in the wiki, nor am I able to find them 
actually used in the USA.

Going through the list of forests for which trails are imported:

  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/US_Forest_Service_Data

I found the Access Trial in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest National 
Forest (northern Georgia):

  http://osm.org/go/ZSFjcox1--

it's tagged with:

 * attribution: USFS
 * bicycle: no
 * foot: yes
 * highway: path
 * horse: no
 * motorcar: yes
 * motorcycle: yes
 * name: Access Trail
 * ref: FS Trail 93A
 * source: USFS_import_v0.2_20090219110826
 * USFS:systemname: Beasley Knob
 * USFS:way_id: 34

I've not seen trail numbering done outside of Georgia. One thing I'm worried 
about is whether forest trail numbering is unique (i.e. 93A). For example, a 
trail in Lincoln National Forest (several thousand miles away from Georgia) is 
numbered "44".

Do others have thoughts on this?

My plans for tagging are:

 * name: "Trail N" for numbered trails without common names. My shapefiles 
don't have common names, i.e. Access Trail or Crest Trail, so I'll have to copy 
these from other FS maps.
 * ref: "N". This is different than the Georgia import… a decision I'm making 
in the interest of elegance/simplicity. If trail numbers are not unique, then 
there's no point having "FS Trail" there.

-- 
Samat K Jain  | GPG: 0x4A456FBA

Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a 
decent sniper rifle.
-- None (10)


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Re: [Talk-us] [Tagging] National Forest trail numbering

[Nathan Edgars II]

I can't speak for other states, but in Florida's Ocala National Forest
the trails, at least the ones you can drive on, are marked with
rectangular brown highway shields, so ref seems appropriate. But you
probably shouldn't leave out all prefixes - for example 43 is a
tertiary road, and with simply ref=43 it wouldn't be clear that it's a
forest road: 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=29.41438&lon=-81.68936&zoom=15&layers=M
I'd find out what abbreviation is most common (NFS? NFD? FS? FR?) and
use it as a prefix.

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Re: [Talk-us] Bulk import help

[Mike N.]

I'm trying to do an import of the local NHD files, but keep running into
issues when I do the final import.  My attempts have been in JOSM, but 
when

I do this, it will upload the points and roughly the first 1000 ways, then
just sit there.


 How long did you wait?   A typical NHD file containing 15,000 to 20,000 
nodes will take at least an hour to upload.   I don't recall how well JOSM 
displays the progress bar for large uploads. 



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Re: [Talk-us] [Tagging] National Forest trail numbering

[Samat K Jain]

On Sunday, August 15, 2010 01:18:37 pm, Nathan Edgars II wrote:
> I can't speak for other states, but in Florida's Ocala National Forest
> the trails, at least the ones you can drive on, are marked with
> rectangular brown highway shields, so ref seems appropriate. But you
> probably shouldn't leave out all prefixes - for example 43 is a
> tertiary road, and with simply ref=43 it wouldn't be clear that it's a
> forest road: 
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=29.41438&lon=-81.68936&zoom=15&layers=M
> I'd find out what abbreviation is most common (NFS? NFD? FS? FR?) and
> use it as a prefix.

Just to be clear, I'm talking about hiking trails. Forest roads in the area 
have already been uploaded with the TIGER import (at least the ones I know of).

On the hiking trails themselves, labeling is very inconsistent. Typically 
they're labeled with common names (e.g.. Three Rivers Trail No. 44), but 
occasionally they're labeled with a 'T' prefix (e.g. T5004). Most forest 
service maps just list the number, e.g. 44, or 5004.

-- 
Samat K Jain  | GPG: 0x4A456FBA

That which does not kill you merely postpones the inevitable.
-- None (673)


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[Talk-us] SOTM-US

[Gregory Arenius]

Since I would like to hear more about what goes on at some of the
conferences I can't make I thought I would post some of what stuck out the
most for me at this one.  This is just what stuck out to me.  If I miss
something or am wrong about something I apologize in advance.

Nama Budhathoki gave a good presentation (over Skype!) on who the
contributors to OSM are and why they do what they do.  It had  breakdowns of
how much people contributed verse what their reasons for contributing were.
It also had a bit on the backgrounds of OSMers such as age, gender, and
traditional GIS experience.

Randal Hale and Leah Keith gave a talk about using OSM as a teaching tool
with high school students.  Her students seemed to really take to it.  It
was also very good because it doesn't cost theschool any money if they
already have computers.  The FREE component was really important.  They can
just make accounts and get started.  They used Mapzen because they found it
to be the most user friendly.  Even after the class project some of the
students have continued to contribute useful data to the map.

Jon Nystrom gave a talk about ArcGIS being able to work directly with OSM
files.  Many attendees were excited about this because many people in
attendance came from a GIS background and 'grew up on' ArcGIS. People like
to use the tools they know.  It will probably help more professionals
contribute to OSM because they won't have to learn a new tool set.

David Cole gave a talk about Mapquest starting to use and examine Mapquest
data.  The next day David Nesbitt gave a talk on how Mapquest routing can
work with OSM data in their testbed.  Basically Mapquest is looking at using
OSM data instead of proprietary data sources.  They plan on contributing
back to OSM in kind and with financial support.  The routing data talked
some about shortcomings in the OSM data set especially in the US.  Some
problems were missing turn restrictions, bad topology (missing connections
or connections that don't actually exist), handling of roads to ferry
terminals, and driveways tagged as residential roads.  Oh, and
addressability. One mentioned strength was good road classifications as
their routing algorithm relies on that pretty heavily. They're using a
mostly open stack except for their routing algorithm.  They've released
they're stylesheets under an open licence but they're still a work in
progress. They have a big tile server that is for open use that can handle
pretty much anything we can throw at it; if I recall correctly something
like 4000 requests a second.  You can check out their work at
http://open.mapquest.co.uk.  Really awesome stuff.  I'm excited by the
possibility that the maps I help make could touch that many people.  Wicked
cool.

Learon Dalby gave a talk about getting government data into OSM from the
government side.  He is part of (head of???) the Arkansas (AR!) GIS team.
They've collected a lot of good data and have released it for free for
anyone to use and he would really like to see it in OSM.  The main problem
is how to get it into OSM.  There was a general consensus (don't quote me on
that!) that there isn't really a set of well defined best practices or a
good tool chain to make this happen and go smoothly at that large of a
scale.  Also, OSMers usually only work on areas that interest them and there
aren't many OSMers in AR.  Another problem was how to flag changes we make
to the data set and send those flags back upstream.  They wouldn't be able
to take our edits directly but just knowing where changes needed to be made
would be a huge help to them.  I think it rocks that the whole open data
movement has made it to the point where there are people in government who
are not merely willing to make data available but that actually want us to
use it and are willing to expend time and effort to make that happen.

Carl Anderson had a similar talk the next day about using government data.
He suggested that using GIS conflation and road matching tools might help
ease imports some even if we have to translate to a GIS format and back.
OpenJump in particular was mentioned as being a good open source tool for
that purpose.  He also mentioned how checking the merged data with different
renderers and stylesheets was helpful because they all have different
strengths and weaknesses.

Ian Dees talked about using shp-2-osm to import data into OSM.

We had the OSM-US annual meeting.  OSM-US is incorporated, is trying to
become a certified non-profit, and has approximately $250 in its vast
coffers.  Voting for the new board kicked off and will be open to OSM-US
members for the next two weeks.  Voting will be run on a survey monkey
platform by outside observers from two different open source projects.  You
can vote even if you haven't joined yet.  You just have to join before you
vote.

Thea Clay talked about building community and running mapping parties, mappy
hours and mapathons.  Steve mentioned that all of the successful European