I'd like to post some of our local mountain bike trails which I have mapped and marked up. I also have friends who travel to CO, Moab and some parts of the Eastern US. We'd all like to share our maps with each other as well as with the community in general.

The question is how to best organize the maps. Ideally there is a specific tag, such as mountain bike trails or something else which makes it easy to find the data.

It would also be nice if there were a specific format which could be mandated or agreed upon. Is there a process in place for orchestrating this type of thing?

I'd like to make sure our effort provides maximum benefit to us and to the community.

Thanks for your time,

Ricky

Hi Ricky,

There currently isn't a way to do something like this. There is no way to write a custom microformat or schema or something within KML. The best thing you could do is agree on a set of "tags" to put into the <description> element, such as this:

<description><!CData[[Some description...<tag>mountain bike trails</tag>]]></description>. Then post instructions on how to include that on a web page for the group. Maybe post your files there.

If you post the files to the community forums here on the bbs, within a couple of months they will be served to everyone using Google Earth through the community layer. People wanting to search the forum could search on <tag>mountain bike trails</tag> and the search engine would look through the kml of Placemarks people had posted.

ManoM

Hey Ricky, I know there are some websites that share GPX and KML files specifically for mountain biking out there (I happen to run one of them). My site is singletracks.com and I know crankfire.com offers GPS data and maps as well.

Singletracks has more data from Colorado and the west while crankfire has a ton of data from Connecticut and the northeast. It would definitely be cool to see someone come up with a way to format and categorize the data but in the meantime your best bet is to try mountain bike specific sites.

Hope this is helpful!

Jeff
singletracks.com/gps

Hey, I do Crankfire.com

I just released a "Roll your Own" kml creator ( http://www.crankfire.com/news/110906/index.php ) - this allows users to generate kml (and gpx) maps based on any of the gps tracks and waypoints in our "system".

Though we still only accept GPX data so it might not be of much use to you. But I think organizationally its nice?

Plus if you have GPS data you are willing to share.....