Imagine you are traveling to a foreign country and you’d like to find a trail to hike. Or it’s a sunny weekend and you want to find a mountain biking trail nearby. Currently you can search the Internet, read books, use paid apps, or just study a map. One of those maps is OSM and it has a substantial numbers of trails mapped worldwide. But it’s difficult to find trails in OSM using name, distance, features, or elevation gain. Additionally, more information like descriptions, photos, comments, and regulations are scattered. All this contextual information can exist as a separate public catalog of trails connected to OSM.

During my session I would like to show the design for what I’m calling trailcatalog.org and encourage developers to join the open source project. Following the standards started by opentraildata.org, I am working on a prototype for selecting an OSM trail, naming it, and adding markers. This trail view can then be added to the catalog and embedded on a page with photos, descriptions, and other editorial content. With OSM as a strong foundation, I believe there is an opportunity to build the Wikipedia of trails on a global scale.