> My impression about this OSM trail db is that it is not the right way to do trail identification.
> I mean many thing is missing :
> - rider impression
> - photos
> - path description
Well, storing photos is (currently) not supported, but I personally do not miss them. As one of big advantages (and the real main task) of OSM is to create maps for special purposes and take them with you on a portable (and _offline_) GPS-device like a
Garmin; integrating photos could create data volume disaster btw.
Concerning your "rider impression" and "path description" points, do you mean textual data to read? Then you are wrong. OSM provides a "note" tag to add textual remarks to ways or waypoints. You only have to use (or create) a map which provides access to these data, e.g. like the "All In One" map for
Garmin devices does (and then add comments like this: "Stop cycling here to look east end enjoy the beautiful view." ;-)).
> The cotation alone is quite useless (excluding the fact that a cotation is very subjective).
Sorry, I am not sure about what the word "cotation" means, do you mean "notation"? If you refer to the notation by "single trail scale", which is the base for "mtb:scale", you may read the definitions:
http://www.singletrail-skala.de/ (mainly in German, but a language switch is right at the top of this page).
Of course there may be some small room for personal interpretation, but I do not see why this scale may be _very_ subjective or useless at all (have a look at the well documented examples).
Additionally to the "mtb:scale" tag OSM provides a lot of other attributes to describe the physical nature of a way or path, e.g. the well established "sac_scale" (
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:sac_scale), see here for more options like inclination etc.:
http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/407/how-should-i-tag-hiking-trails
> My conclusion is that this OSM db is not used by
you famous riders.
First of all you need some skills to work with OSM effectively, but it is not really difficult. Second is, you must really _like_ to publish your knowledge. At that point some people may fail, but honestly I don't care.
Guido
