Road Centerlines, Great Smoky Mountains National Park

These data depict Road Segment Centerlines and attributes for roads that are managed and maintained by the National Park Service. Road data are used for many purposes including planning and management, mapping and condition assessment, routing and navigation, public information, emergency response, and research. A current, accurate representation of park roads is needed for national reporting and a variety of mapping requirements at all levels of the National Park Service and the general public. A National-level dataset allows the NPS to communicate a consistent and high-quality roads database to NPS staff, partners, visitors, and entities that produce maps and location-based services of park units. The collection, storage, and management of road-related data are important components of everyday business activities in many Federal and State land-managing agencies, road organizations, and businesses. From a management perspective, road data must often mesh closely with other types of infrastructure, resource, and facility enterprise data. For the public using paper maps, the internet, GPS or other instrumentation, standard data formats enable users to consistently and predictably identify specific trails and a core set of corresponding information. Today, digital road data are a necessity throughout a road data management life-cycle, from road planning through design, construction, operation, and maintenance. Automating, sharing, and leveraging road data through this widely accepted standard can provide a variety of important benefits: Efficiency – creating and gathering road data that are standardized and readily usable. Compatibility – compiling data from one project or discipline that can be compatible with other applications; Consistency – using the same standards, meshing data produced by one organization with that developed by another; Speed – hastening the availability of data through a reduction in duplicative efforts and lowered production costs (Applications can be developed more quickly and with more interoperability by using existing standards-compliant data); Conflict resolution – resolving conflicting road data more easily if compliant to the same standards; Reliability – improving the quality of shared road data by increasing the number of individuals who find and correct errors; and Reusability – allow maximum reuse across agencies and support objectives of EGovernment (E-Gov) initiatives and enterprise architecture.