OpenStreetMap
Completed a 50 mile section of hiking trail in NY/NJ USA
Posted by majormajor42 on 17 June 2010 in English.I've been doing a bit of hiking the last few months. No major multi-day trips but I've had a few 10 mile + days. Up to now, my focus has been working on filling in the Long Path trail on the map. It is a 300 mile regional trail that runs north from New York City. Just a couple days ago, I completed the southern 50 miles of the trail, from the George Washington Bridge to the intersection with the Appalachian Trail.
About a month ago, I figured out how to use the routing features of the map. So I connected the whole 50 mile section with one routing tag relation "919642".
So now that I've intersected with the Appalachian Trail, and hiked a very small portion of it, I wanted to see what relations already exist for this major popular national trail. So I typed "Appalachian" into the "add a relation" feature in potlatch. I was surprised to see at least seven relations already exist. I picked what I thought was the best of them to label my section of the AT.
So, I'm thinking, since this is one 2,175 mile long continuous trail in the United States, it should have only one relation tag.
This page: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_United_States_Long_Distance_Trails
indicates that "156553" should be that relation that is used. It is a low number compared to the other relations so perhaps that means that it came first. It has two problems though. It lists the AMC as the operator. AMC only maintains a 300 mile portion of the trail. Other trail conference groups maintain other portions of the trail. So I would either want to remove the operator tag (and put it as one of the way tags for individual sections of the trail) or change it to Appalachian Trail Conservancy which is the main group overseeing the whole trail (as I understand it).
the other issue with "156553" is that it has a note attached to it that some extra nodes were removed. I think I will try to remove this note from the relation.
Are there any good hiking maps made with OSM that might show off the trails that I have made? Oh, just found this:
http://osm.lonvia.de/world_hiking.html?zoom=13&lat=41.20296&lon=-74.06751&layers=FFBT
If "AT" appears as a label of portions of the Appalachian Trail, how can I get "LP" to appear over my portions of the "long path"? Perhaps I need to capitalize the L and P in the name Long Path?
Discussion
Comment from JohnSmith on 18 June 2010 at 00:02
A couple of comments, you might want to make a relation of a relation in this case, use smaller relations to group sections of the trail and tag with the operator of that section, then add a super relation of all the smaller relations.
I wouldn't necessarily call that a good hiking map, it's the same base tiles with hiking trails highlighted, I'm currently planning to make a hiking style sheet that is similar to maps produced by the national parks and wildlife service and to render bush walking important things, and remove/reduce the focus/importance on things not import, also to add contour lines.
As for the label, you may need to add a ref=* or name=* tag, I doubt changing the case will have much effect.
Comment from lonvia on 18 June 2010 at 14:09
As a matter of fact, changing the case does have an effect, as you already seem to have discovered by now. If the relation does not have a ref-Tag, the map tries to be clever and makes a reference up by using the capitalized letters. However, this is only done as a last resort. As John said, using the ref-Tag is much better. The map also shows osmc:symbol-Tags ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:osmc:symbol ), but I'm not sure that this system is very useful outside Europe.