OSM - Open Street Map

[Adventure Mapper]

Another subject was touched on at the end of "access to public information ..." and it deserves a thread of its own.

People have begun to compile accurate records of trails from their GPS tracks. This is a great thing although it does raise the issue of how much should be published. Some trails should probably remain secret but there is no reason not to publish accurate information about maintained trails on public land in a way that can be downloaded into a GPS receiver.

I don't have any experience entering information into Open Street Map but I have friends in the GIS community who think it is the best place for trails. That is certainly true for the trails of Forest Park so it seems like the benefits of a seamless, routeable, trail network would draw wilderness trails into OSM also. Trails that people want to publish to a restricted audience are another matter. The first word of OSM is "open".

[Koda]

Weve had similar debate somewhere in this forum. IMO, I don't think publishing publicly GPS tracks of un-maintained/unofficial trails should be done. But then that makes those trails exclusive. The way I look at it, is leave something to the imagination of others. Its a wilderness begging to be explored and sometimes that includes old abandoned trails.

I tried once to upload a track of a (maintained) hiking trail to TopOSM (OSM topo project) but didnt work. I don't know why anyone would do a topo map project and not include the existing trails, I cant find any on the TopOSM maps, but they are on the OSM maps.

I think it would be cool to have access to GPX tracks of all open trails, would be useful for winter (under snow) and for those "maintained" trails that are actually not.

[Koda]

I have to add though that TopOSM is a beautiful mapset. Too bad it doesnt show all the trails