[Tagging] Catchment Areas

[Tobias Johansson]

2012/12/1 Christopher Baines <cbaines8 at gmail.com>:
> On Sat, 2012-12-01 at 09:24 -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
>> The problem with representing catchment areas in OSM is that it rapidly
>> gets into the "one database, one man's treasure, another's junk"
>> problem, because it leads to objects for things that don't really exist,
>> but are only enshrined in policies of various kinds.
>
> These things that don't exist, are still really important. Consider for
> instance a map without international borders, turn restrictions on
> roads, and probably some more...
>

I think the difference is the relationship (demand for the
data)/(impact for the editors) is different, yes we have many things
that are immaterial but that does not mean everthing immaterial should
be added. Some thing might so far better be handeled outside the osm
db. (see http://openaviationmap.org/ )

But I agree if we would have a layer-based interface in the future
this could/should be added.

Only my personal thought..

>> I can see the point that in mapping a developing country for health
>> care, these boundaries might be very important to map users and editors
>> relative to other data.  But if I think about the area around me, there
>> are probably 5 places that will deliver food, and adding 5 polygons to
>> the map for that already seems unreasonable.  My city friends probably
>> have hundreds of places that will deliver.
>
> In a large city, most food places will probably deliver to certain
> already mapped areas, hence you only need to add the tag pointing to a
> pre-existing object, not create 5 polygons. You also don't have to have
> this tag on all services with catchment areas, it can just be used when
> useful.
>
>> Also, it seems that catchment area is a marketing term, and the concepts
>> of
>>
>>   "to where will we deliver, rather than refusing the order"
>>   "from what areas (of home address) will we treat patients"
>>   "from what areas do we consider ourself to be the hospital of record"
>>
>> are all very different questions.  It may be that what's needed for is a
>> more traditional GIS analysis showing distance to facilities from
>> everywhere.
>
> I have little knowledge about GIS, but it seems to me like the above
> questions all involve the same data, the Catchment Area of the service.
> When writing the proposal, I was trying to think about the definition of
> catchment area on Wikipedia [1]
>
>> I suspect the real discusion will be about adding polygons to be targets
>> of this tag, rather than the tag itself.
>
> I might not have understood your point here, but I imagine most of the
> catchment areas will be best mapped as multipolygon relations at least
> in high density areas, hence not cluttering up current editors.
>
> 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catchment_area_%28human_geography%29
>
>
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