[OSM-dev] Coastline as part of other object types?

[SandorS]

About two weeks ago I asked a similar question on the Help Forum without getting any help.
More precisely, my question was this https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/68275/coastline-as-part-of-a-multipolygon .
Of course, the notes related to the example/illustration are fully correct but have very little to do with the dilemma. I am convinced that this forum/list is much more appropriate to repeat the former question in the link. Some more arguments.
Users, like me, when processing the OSM source data, we see a large/huge number of cases where coastline objects are used as parts of other object types like lakes, rivers, fiords, sees, borders and so on. The large number of cases indicate that this is more a practice now than accident. In my opinion a (very) wrong practice. Let me present some illustrative arguments.
-There is still a large number of small coastline polygons inside the coastline defined continents. As discussed many times, these coastline errors are actually missing islands in lakes, or rivers or even missing lakes. Just recently, many mappers compensate for these missing objects by uploading area objects like place=island/islet, or lake directly referring to a coastline geometry. So, we get coastline objects in none coastline objects. It is worth noting that even if in some maps these compensations look correct, essentially it is still wrong. A standalone coastline object tagged as place=island is never part of a river or lake data. Very similar issues happen with the large number of natural=land objects.
-Many of us remember the confusion created with bay/fiord area objects. Especially when rendering of these was a requirement. Creating a large bay object is not a simple exercise. These objects often contain thousands of holes/islands and then it is easy ti miss some hundreds. The prototype example of the confusion was the Bothnia bay. Lacily, someone with a strong sense simply removed the whole bay object. However, there are still many other large bay area objects, probably ignored by most of the map-makers in rendering. Yet, these objects add huge redundancy to the source data. 
-Finally, the crown example of the unreasonable “coastline in other objects” is the recently uploaded/edited Barents Sea. It is a multipolygon monster tagged as place=sea somewhere here 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/9382300#map=4/77.15/39.29 
Any trials to see this object or its geometry in OSM maps (usually I check some 40) fails on my (really) robust machine. But then, what was the intention, the purpose, of creating and uploading such a monster object. Just to see the name variations and have a Wikipedia link? I am not sure whether the geometry definition in this object is legal or not but anyway it just adds a huge redundancy to the source data.
In advance thanks for the help/answer, Sandor

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

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