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Providing Trail Data
This documentation is for anyone who plans to create data meant for upload into the To The Trails application.
The data format for To The Trails data files is specified in the trail data standard.
Required data fields are described in that document, and descriptions of the three types of trail data are included in the user documentation.
For live examples of the data, see the following JSON endpoints:
- http://tothetrails.com/trails.json for trail data.
- http://tothetrails.com/trailheads.json for trailhead data.
- http://tothetrails.com/trailsegments.json for trail segment data.
Note that while the system accepts a CSV file for the trail data, and shapefiles for trailhead and segment data, these URLs return GeoJSON responses. GeoJSON files are also accepted by the system for all three types of data, so these responses may be saved, modified, and re-submitted to the application if desired. Modern GIS software should be able to import these files.
(The trails.json endpoint returns GeoJSON even though is doesn't contain any geospatial data used by the application. It includes a single point [0,0] for each trail in order to satisfy our GeoJSON parser/generator. That point is ignored by the uploading parser if the file is submitted.)
All geodata provided in all organizations' trail segments file is displayed in the public application at certain zoom levels, whether or not each individual segment is part of a listed trail. This helps show users the full extent of the local trail network, including sections like connector trails that don't merit metadata or searchability. If a user hovers over a particular segment, all of the trail1-trail6 fields for that trail segment will appear in a popup.
For a trail:
- to appear in the list of trails in the informational panel,
- to be searchable using that panel,
- to have metadata to be displayed about it,
Its name needs to appear in three different places:
- as the "name" field for a record in the trail metadata
- in one of the trail1-trail6 data fields for at least one trailhead
- in one of the trail1-trail6 data fields for at least one trail segment
It must be an exact match in all three locations. If a trail name does not exist in all three locations, it will not be browsable in the list of trails, or searchable, and its metadata will not be displayed anywhere in the public application.
If a trail you expect to see listed is not, check for its name in all three locations.
See the user documentation for full instructions for uploading data into the system. Note that a data upload will replace all data for a specific type (trails, trailheads, trailsegments). This includes any changes made using the park information UI, such as trail status and descriptions. (Trail photos uploaded via the UI should remain associated with a trail as long as the trail name doesn't change.)
As noted in the user documentation, it is strongly suggested that you click on the link provided to download a copy of your organization's existing data before uploading new data.
Note that there are several fields in the data standard that are not used in the application. Some of these fields are ignored by the uploader, but segment-specific access/use fields (such as "dogs", "equestrian", "xcntryski", and so on) are stored in the database and returned in the data provided at the trailsegments.json endpoint above. While segment-level access/use fields are not used in the current application, trail-level access/use fields are used.
Future versions of this app, or other applications, may end up using this segment-level access/use data. It's recommended that you provide this data if it's available in case it turns out to be useful to later versions of this or other applications.