[OSM-newbies] Estuaries and large bays

[swanilli]

On 23/10/2010, Andrew Harvey <andrew.harvey4 at gmail.com> wrote:
> When this was tried for some areas in my local area with natural=bay
> instead of natural=water, with no coastline tag around the edge, and
> instead cutting the coastline across the entrance, the bay rendered in
> Mapnik as land, not water. I'm thinking this a bug in mapnik that I
> should report, but I'm not really sure.

My experience too.

On 20/10/2010, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:
> There are almost 15000 points in the OSM database that include
> natural=bay. There are 241 polygons that include natural=bay.
>
> Place a point in the bay, and tag it as
> natural=bay
> name=My Bay Name

Given that for the entire coastline of the world there are only 241
polygons tagged natural=bay I would have to say that tagging a polygon
as natural=bay is extremely rare.

I am in Sydney, Australia and there would be close to this number of
named bays within 100 km of Sydney alone. Tagging them as points and
not polygons is consistent with usage on official maps, simple and
avoids the problem of undefined boundaries at interfaces with other
bodies of water like oceans.

Given the problem of rendering polygons as natural=bay and the
rareness of this I think that Richard Weait's tagging should be used
and the tagging of polygons as natural=bay should be deprecated.

If the body of water requires a polygon and tagging, then it should be
tagged natural=water, which does not have these problems.