Cursory?!!! I have spent hundreds of hours analysing government trail data from many different agencies, as well as mapping trails in OSM, and attempting to provide feedback to government agencies! I worked with a local TV news station on a story about the problems with government trail data: Colorado preferred trail navigation app COTREX has its own flaws, hikers say - CBS Colorado. I am offended that you call that cursory. I have made many videos documenting my findings that I have posted on YouTube. Here is just one playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjNfa27uVmKjX4baod9JHSQhEaXuCCFUM
I presented about my work at a major GIS conference this fall.
I research these issues in depth, often looking at documentation from the agency beyond their GIS data, as well as visiting many trails and taking geotagged phones of signs, recording GPS traces, etc. I am not “throwing darts”, I am only reporting the evidence that I have uncovered. Why does this bother you?
And zero time talking with anyone in the trails working group that you’re trying to “pause”.
As far as I’ve seen, the criticisms here are only about the source data sets and not about the quality of mapping that has been done in Utah.
These data sets have flaws, as all government data sets do, but they are useful. I’ve used them myself and I know that they can help diligent mappers produce excellent results.
If you’re seeing issues with the work done by US Trails Stewardship Utah mappers, comment on their changesets.
If there’s a clear pattern of poor quality mapping, document that and bring it to the attention of the campaign first, and the broader community only if that doesn’t produce results.
Otherwise, I say keep mapping.
So you take back that my review was “cursory”?
Regarding talking to the group, since I am not on Slack, I was not aware of what was going on.
Very little discussion happens on Slack. The meetings happen on Zoom. Reach out to Maggie Cawley or Diane Fritz to get added to the calendar invite.
ZeLonewolf meant that the Trails Working Group has been working on the preparation to get to this point for the past two years.
I would also like to offer that the intent of the Utah Pilot is not to add any new trail geometries.
As stated in the announcement (emphasis mine):
volunteers will be tasked with updating attributes of existing trails in OpenStreetMap using official and approved sources. The Utah campaign will focus on improving trail attributes based on the trail tagging guidelines developed as a result of the trails tagging schema pilot in Washington state.
@tekim, I’d like to join others here in encouraging you to become involved in the Trails Working group if that’s of interest to you. It sounds like your extensive experience would be valuable to the group.
I will just say that I’m not at all surprised this campaign is receiving some pushback. Some of the language describing it like the snippet below (emphasis mine) is almost guaranteed to elicit a negative response from some portion of the mapper population:
volunteers will be tasked with updating attributes of existing trails in OpenStreetMap using official and approved sources
There is a contingent of mappers who do not like being told what to do, and certainly don’t like the implication that official or approved sources are superior to previously mapped data in OSM. I don’t think the folks setting up these trail campaigns and initiatives mean to communicate this, but it concerns me that words have not been chosen more carefully so the message would be received positively by OSM mappers. Perhaps this whole conversation could have been avoided if the above sentence had be this instead:
Mappers will update attributes on existing trails in OpenStreetmap using maps and datasets published by land managers as a reference.
Yes @ezekielf, good call. I’m certain that “tasked with” came purely from the fact that we’re using a tasking manager to help organize the efforts for those that want to partake. And yes, as was shared in our brown bag webinar today, we want folks to use all the reference data they have, including their personal knowledge, to create the best and most complete trail data possible.
I disagree on this. I don’t like the implication that groups working in good faith to improve OSM need to craft their language to that level when the burden should be on people who have concerns to ask more questions about what those words mean rather than switching immediately to attack mode.
Word choice certainly matters, but I don’t see anything in the highlighted text that couldn’t be reasonably resolved in an open-minded discussion that starts with asking for more information, and I think that’s a fine bar for working groups and affiliates to clear in drafting language. Anything beyond that is on the people reading it, in my opinion.
I did not intend to imply any such thing. Of course nobody is ever required to carefully craft their language, but when you don’t then people can interpret your message differently than you intended. That’s all. I say this as someone who has spent a considerable amount of time participating in the trails working group (though I haven’t been involved recently). My interest is in seeing its efforts succeed rather than be met with pushback and mischaracterization simply because the messaging stepped on some obvious OSM landmines.
I can see both sides here. @ezekielf you definitely have a point that word choice matters, especially given the number of OSMers who don’t feel comfortable with any manifestation of hierarchy or authority in this context, of which there are many. It’s useful to appreciate the ways in which members of the OSM audience who share that view might read this, and I think it’s worth pointing out.
But I also agree with @Spatialia’s perspective that “attacking” is hardly the right reaction, and that questioning is.
With that said, I don’t really think anybody is attacking anything as a result of word-choice here (though, frankly, I’m not happy to have seen some of the strong nearly ad-hominems that have emerged in this thread).
Thanks - I don’t want to make it seem like you’re saying something you’re not, so I’m sorry for that. I very much respect and appreciate your contributions to this effort and the broader community.
Agreed - all parties bear responsibility for understanding each other. My point is that once the writers have put in reasonable work to be clear themselves, the reader becomes responsible for interpretation or raising questions about interpretation. Misunderstandings will happen despite best efforts of all parties, but I think how we handle them is more important than trying to eradicate them entirely. I don’t want to ask people sharing ideas to agonize over every word for fear of how a small portion of the community might react. I also know that’s not what you’re trying to suggest they do, but it’s my concern over what it means to focus more responsibility for wording on the authors - I think we need more energy as a community focused on improving how people respond to things they don’t like so that authors don’t need to worry about minor mis-wordings.
I’m also bringing some broader concerns I have with communication patterns in the community to this discussion though, in addition to separate discussions on this particular topic, so I can be quiet if I’m getting us off on a tangent - I don’t take issue with your communications :).
My objection is not with the language, it is with the risk of conflating very flawed government data with OSM (note that the data from some agencies is probably a lot better than others). My point was to provide information, express reasonably derived concern (that defective data would leak into OSM), and ask for a pause. While I can understand that people who have obviously put a lot of effort into the campaign may not have liked what I had to say, what I wrote was not an “attack.”
There are errors in the tagging/attribution in the government data in addition to errors in geometry. The government data is also missing trails, which will lead official trails being tagged as informal=yes.
Hi Mike,
I understand your concerns and that you have expertise in this area. You seem to be assuming in your posts that the trails working group will be blindly copying data from government sources without having any similar expertise to your own. I don’t think that’s a valid assumption about the group of people working on this. Wouldn’t it be better to ask the working group for more information on how they’ll determine which data source is more authoritative when OSM data conflicts with official data and what controls they’ll have in place to protect the quality of OSM data? That gives them a chance to demonstrate the same expertise.
Hi Nick,
I didn’t mean to imply that the WG members were not experts, only that I had some information that they might not be aware of. Also, just to be as honest as possible with everyone, all of my work has been done in Colorado so far, and mostly with USFS data and Colorado State Park data. Utah may be different. To be fair, the NPS data from NPS directly that I have looked at so far looks pretty good (Rocky Mountain National Park near here was updated a couple of years ago).
I am not assuming people will be blindly copying data, but in some cases there is no way to tell there is an issue, no matter how much online research one does, without a ground survey.
I will try to formulate my specific concerns as questions. That is a good suggestion, thanks.
Mike
Unfortunately, there is no sure-fire method of gauging governmental data. E.g. just computing deviations from OSM data 
will not work, as openstreetmap data also cannot be blindly trusted. 
Here the process I have been using:
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Download OSM highway=path/footway/bridleway/cycleway/track
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Buffer by 15 meters (~49 feet). This is somewhat arbitrary, but the US National Map Accuracy Standard for 1:24K maps is 40 feet if I recall. So this gives the government data the benefit of the doubt.
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Subtract buffered OSM from government data
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Flag any trail in the government data where more than 40 meters (somewhat arbitrary) or 50% of the original length remain after the subtraction.
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Manually review all of the above flagged trails using imagery, Strava Heatmap, USGS 3D Elevation Data, other government sources (e.g. USFS has written descriptions for many trails, which doesn’t necessarily agree with its own GIS data, also, any new trail is required to go through an approval process that includes a spatial component, and those documents are available online), my own GPS traces, GPS traces others have uploaded to OSM, geotagged photos I have taken (for name, number, and allowed uses). I also sometimes make phone calls to local officials, visitor bureaus, etc to ask about the existence of certain trails and whether they are official, what their names are, and what uses are allowed.
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Any government trail that remains after the review is considered an error, although in some cases there is conflicting evidence, or no evidence, and these trails go into a third category which will require an in person survey.
In other news related to this general topic, I have been added to the invite for the TWG Zoom calls.
Could someone link to the on-wiki documentation of the proposal for this organized edit?
I also not that if it was announced 16 days ago for review, the soonest anyone should have been editing is 2 days ago