[Imports] Pacific Crest Trail ShapeFile

[Dan Homerick]

For non-Americans, or non-hikers, the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) is a
2,650 miles (4,265 km) long trail route that runs from the Mexico
border in California all the way up to the Canadian border in
Washington.

There's a pretty high detail ShapeFile for the whole thing at the US
Forest Service page devoted to the trail:

http://www.fs.fed.us/pct/
http://www.fs.fed.us/pct/downloads/PCT_shapefile.zip

Using the Merkaartor editor, I've looked at the data overlapped on the
OSM, and at least at first pass, it doesn't seem like much of it is
already in the OSM.

Should I import it, and if so, how?

Here's the issues as I see them. First, the PCT is clearly a relation,
not just a path. But all we have is the data of where it goes, not
what roads, tracks, and paths it's following. Second, the shapefile
doesn't give hint of what type of road/track/path it is, so in
sections where the road/track/path is missing, it seems like we'll
need to first add some paths (tagged with highway=road ?), then add
those paths to the Pacific Crest Trail relation.

I think the proper solution is probably to write a script that creates
a relation, then traverses the PCT looking for existing 'highway'
tagged ways nearby, adding them to the relation if found. If no
appropriate way is found nearby, then create a highway=road tagged way
from the shapefile data.

I'm a programmer, and would be willing to try it myself, but since I
currently know nothing about OSM's API, and relatively little about
it's standard practices, the potential for me to mess it up is a
little intimidating.

Is there a sandbox to play in?

For that matter, what's a good algorithm for calculating if two ways
are 'close', favoring longer ways, and strongly favoring groups of
ways which are close to the shapefile data AND which are connected to
each other? Is that the right way to be thinking about it?

Is there a wiki page that talks about how to avoid importing overlapping data?

And last question, is anyone else interested in taking the data and
running with it?

Cheers,
 - Dan