I just noticed that the Appalachian Trail is no longer showing up at low and medium zoom levels on Waymarked Trails. I don’t have time to look into it right now, but does anyone know what happened? @quincylvania, it looks like you’ve been doing some some work on it recently. Guessing that has something to do with it?
To whomever is working on it, thank you. I had been active in OSM AT stewardship but have gotten away from it. One important thing we need is a standard naming of the sub-relations so the exposed name is not an internal tracking name for the relation.
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I believe the relevant issue is Support route classification in `network:type` as well as in `network` · Issue #16 · waymarkedtrails/waymarkedtrails-backend · GitHub, i.e. changes in the network values. As said in the issue, I’m not against adding support for the new tagging to waymarkedtrails but I believe this should be discussed first, preferably on an international level.
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Hi all, I indeed changed the Appalachian Trail and other National Scenic Trail relations from network=nwn to network=US:NST + network:type=nwn. This may have been a bit premature and broke some apps, but my intention was to “be bold” and spur some change. The network=xxx format has a number of issues discussed elsewhere that I’m happy to go into further.
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You’ve just hit the reason why it is complex to turn these discussions into concrete actions.
Got it. That makes sense why it disappeared 
. Yes probably a bit premature, but I agree that the network=xxx format is not great and a better way of classifying trails would be good. Seems like that’s going to need a wider discussion with the international community for any such change to happen though.
I see you’ve also decided to split up the overall AT route relation in more detail by the club that maintains each section. Before a few weeks ago the route had 14 sub-routes, now it has 30 and some are quite short. I can see the logic in this, but it seems a bit overly complex and leads to some awkward discontinuities. For example, the AMC section has a gap in it where the Randolph Mountain Club does maintenance. Maybe there’s no problem with this, but I can’t help wondering if it is really necessary.
As far as the AT sub-routes, 30 is sort of a lot but the Pacific Crest Trail has 29, and I’m not sure those are based on real-world subdivisions. Having a single long route is feasible but is troublesome for some tools, and some mappers only want to download a local segment. The state-by-state subdivisions are okay but break down when the trail keeps crossing the state border in NC/TN, plus they’re a bit arbitrary.
As far as I can tell the trail maintenance club jurisdictions are the primary real-world organizational structure of the AT. They don’t always correspond to an operator tag either, as some local park may “operate” an AT segment but have an agreement where the trail club can do certain activities to maintain it. And tying in with the OSM US Trails Stewardship Initiative, some of these trail clubs may want to maintain their GIS data in OSM and having these relations may help with that. Even if people don’t think these routes should be the primary subsections of the AT relation in OSM, it would be nice to keep them represented somehow.
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Oh, also each trail club has its own neat little shield logo. It might be fun to show these along the AT on a map like Americana or OpenTrailMap (assuming we get the right permissions).
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Could you provide some examples in the other thread about shields and blazes? I don’t think folks realize how many different kinds of symbols a given route can have that all matter simultaneously.
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@quincylvania I appreciate your stewardship of trails like this one! Regarding operations of trail segments by ‘Friends of [park name]’ organizations, a convention I’ve landed on with Maryland DNR is to set the owner='name of park/landowner' and operator='name of the friends organization'. This is a simplification because those agreements will vary depending on what has been established. I like the idea of setting up the sub-relations by local club jurisdiction and setting the owner to land owner but operator to the trail club.
Here’s an example trail in Maryland where the operator is the Friends of Patapsco Valley State Park. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources owns the land and performs some functions like 911, but the FPVSP designed, built and maintained the trail.
I like the approach of breaking it up by real-world subdivisions especially if there is real on the ground supporting evidence. It’s a bit awkward that some sections are quite long and others are quite short, but I guess that’s not really a problem. 30 members is not a large number compared to some of the mega relations out there.
A potential issue I see is that a number of these “sections” are actually two discontinuous sections maintained by the same club:
This means the sub routes can’t be sorted into one linear route for the whole AT. Maybe this is less of a problem than I’m imagining and data processing tools should be able to assemble it all together somehow. It doesn’t seem quite right for a linear route though. If this is a problem, there could be two sub-routes for each of these clubs–one for each continuous section.
OK, I had to take a deep dive into this and make a map to support these claims 
I set up a quick web app showing that NPS data in a more visually distinctive format that delineates the various trail club sections. There are indeed, quite a few small trail club sections:
An alternate to trail sections’ sub-relations could be doing it by “A.T. Region” of which there are fewer and the sections are contiguous.
edit: cleanup legend on regions
7 posts were merged into an existing topic: Hiking route network tagging
I have started an international discussion topic here: Hiking route network tagging