[Tagging] Tagging Inland Marinas, Ports, Docks and Basins

[Mike Valiant]

I'm fairly new to OSM but I am interested in adding the data on and around inland waterways in the UK as I have a boat and find that the detail on Bing and Google maps are very poor for showing how to get to local amenities on foot from a waterway. I am thoroughly confused however how best to tag water spaces built for the mooring of boats. Historically, in the late 1700's early 1800's, when such places were constructed for freight they were variously called docks, basins or ports and were used for the loading and unloading of boats, or trans-shipment between boats, as well as the mooring of boats awaiting for orders. Today, of course, the majority of these are used for mooring leisure boats and have been joined by new constructions which are usually called marinas. Most of these are scooped out of farmland although some leverage existing flooded quarries.
Potlatch offers an icon for tagging marinas but the tag it applies is leisure=marina which according to the wiki should be used to cover the full extent of facilities associated with a marina including any land-based services. I find it regularly applied just to the water space with another tag to make sure it renders as water; often waterway=canal which renders as a line on some renderers even though it is a drawn as a polygon.
I've also found inland marinas tagged waterway=dock which broadly matches the wiki description if you substitute "boats" for "ships" in the description. Although it doesn't specifically mention mooring, which would also be a function inherently supported by a ship dock as well as a boat dock. Many marinas include some kind of slipway or dry-dock for boat repair.
I've also are also some marinas tagged as landuse=basin, but I notice that landuse=reservoir has been deprecated to be replaced by natural=water+water=reservoir. On this basis, why hasn't landuse=basin waterway=dock been similarly deprecated?
I have to say I find natural=water counter intuitive for man-made structures that contain water, but if this is the way forward I'll go with the flow.
In which case a marina should be tagged natural=water, but then water =?  marina,mooring,dock, basin,port? Or doesn't it matter? Is it good to capture the historical usage? I assume boat=yes could also be added to indicate it a navigable water space?
Advice please!//Mike


 		 	   		  
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