[Tagging] [Feedback call] Waterway mooring places

[Yohan Boniface]

Hi mappers!

As part of the Open Riverboat Map project [1], some mappers and me have 
started a work that intends to coordinate tagging for the navigable 
waterways.
One of the first tagging question we need to address is river mooring. 
Here is the summary of some days of discussion in #OSM.

Regarding inland moorings, we can distinguish three categories: 
"harbour", "seasonal administered visitor mooring", "unregulated mooring".

Here is how I think we can define those categories:
* harbour: it has an harbour master, it is open all the day long, one 
can have a long term mooring contract (ex.: [2] or [3])
* seasonal administered visitor mooring ("halte nautique" in French): 
someone administer the mooring (but it could be free of charge), and you 
have services like toilets, electricity and water, but a boat cannot 
stay here for a long term, and generally it's closed in winter (ex.: [4] 
or [5])
* unregulated mooring: it's just a place designed for mooring, but with 
no services and no specific authority managing it (ex. a pontoon before 
or after a lock)

Now, what are the actual uses:
* both "harbours" and "seasonal administered visitor moorings" are 
generally tagged using "leisure=marina" in a node
* generally, "permanent harbours" are also tagged with "harbour=yes" and 
all the harbour:* namespaced metadatas ; also, some of the "administered 
visitor mooring" have been tagged like this
* when tagged, "unregulated moorings" have been tagged with 
"mooring=yes" and "made_man=pier" generally

What are the problems?
* the English wiki [6] say: "An facility in which smaller pleasure boats 
and yachts are moored should not be tagged as a harbour, and should be 
tagged using leisure=marina instead." Note that both French and German 
versions of this page define a "harbour:category=marina" value.
* we need to be consistent between harbours, seaside or inland ones, and 
all kind of mooring we can have to map, regarding the metadatas, like: 
"maxlength", "maxdraft", "maxspeed", "maxstay", "VHF_channel", "phone", 
etc.; some of them are namespaced with harbour, for example 
"harbour:ship:maxdraft" or "harbour:VHF_channel".

Needs:
1. being able to distinguish the big harbour of Rotterdam from the 
pontoon near the lock behind my boat ;
2. get a continuous tagging schema between inland and seaside mooring places
3. keep metadatas consistent between all those categories of mooring


** Proposal **

Principles:
1. stop namespacing when not needed (harbour:ship:maxdraft => maxdraft)
2. distinguish between physical mooring information (a pontoon, a pier, 
etc.) and "administrative" mooring information
3. use a continuous tagging schema for all the "administrative mooring 
places", starting from the seasonal boats stop in a nice Burgundy town 
to the Antwerpen harbour, no matter if it's for professional boats or 
pleasure ones

Tagging schema:
* physical mooring info should be tagged using ways ("man_made=pier", 
etc.) with the tag "mooring=yes", just like it is already done,
* as soon as the place can be defined as an administrative mooring place 
(basically if it has a name as mooring place), add a node with at least 
"harbour=yes", "name=foo" (protip: if you cannot add "name" key, it's 
not an administrative mooring place) and "harbour:category=" defined 
(use "harbour:category=marina" for pleasure mooring places); the 
"harbour:category" key will be the differential element between harbours 
kind
* add metadatas to this node, but avoiding useless namespacing: 
"VHF_channel=", "maxdraft", etc.
Basically, namespaces should be used only to prevent name clashes. So 
for example "name:it" makes sense because we cannot have many "name" 
key, while we can have to deal with many names; in the other hand, 
maxdraft for a harbour node can apply only to boats;
* seasonal mooring places should be tagged also with "seasonal=yes"
* "leisure=marina" can be used for the whole area when it makes sense, 
but avoiding using it as descriptive node


Thanks for reading.
Feedback expected.

Yohan

[1] https://github.com/yohanboniface/OpenRiverboatMap
[2] 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=48.690838&lon=2.390857&zoom=18&layers=M
[3] http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=47.10492&lon=5.2604&zoom=17&layers=M
[4] http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=48.387684&lon=2.96002&zoom=18&layers=M
[5] 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=48.416505&lon=3.241911&zoom=18&layers=M
[6] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Harbour