[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Enhancing natural=peak tag

Christoph Hormann chris_hormann at gmx.de
Wed Jul 9 11:39:08 UTC 2014


On Wednesday 09 July 2014, Daniel Koć wrote:
> [...] It's just my beginnings there, so
> I'll wait some time before saying anything conclusive, but for now
> I'm very surprised how the low hanging fruit can be not picked for so
> long without anybody noticing it, even if all the code is already
> waiting to be merged (
> https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/705 ).

I can very much relate to that but this is not a matter that can be 
resolved easily.  Everyone has things he/she likes to change in the 
standard map style but good map design is something that very much 
needs good coordination for an harmonic overall appearance.  This is 
difficult in an open community approach.

My opinion is that the best approach would be to establish better means 
for people to create variants of the style and present them to a broad 
audicence.  This would have two effects - first it would allow changes 
to be tested more thoroughly making actual merging of changes into the 
main style less risky to break things and second it would help making 
the whole process more democratic since a change that is good and 
popular and already available to the community will put pressure on the 
style maintainers to integrate it.

Of course such a scenario would require quite significant ressources to 
implement, it would be a very worthy project for anyone looking for a 
specific area to support OSM monetarily.

Currently the main alternatives to the standard style are the region 
specific versions created by some local communities (like french and 
german).  Those however are quite specific in aim and are too different 
from the main style for things to easily be contributed back into the 
standard style.  Also these styles themselves are not really in open 
development.

> For me it tells us clearly that at least we should track such things
> better. If we made just a simple wiki table named "Accepted
> propositions - rendering state" with current comments from rendering
> team ("done", "todo - from when", "wontfix - reasons", "undecided -
> problems to be solved"), it could help us connecting loose ends a
> lot! I can even do it myself, but I need to know it would be used at
> all. I don't know yet how big is the gap between default tagging and
> default rendering.

In general a good tagging scheme should stand alone and not be designed 
specifically for a certain rendering.  To this aim it is quite good not 
to have a too close connection between tagging and rendering.  A tag 
that contains useful and specific information can also be useful in 
rendering even if the actual way it is rendered is not considered 
during tag design.

> [...] I would rather include all such icons
> in general, because there was a reason somebody wrote it, a community
> consensus was established and it immediately promotes using such
> quality-approved tags. If we want to avoid the clutter (which is a
> noble aim in itself), don't try to avoid it altogether, but rather
> set the reasonable zoom threshold.

<sigh>

Fixed zoom threshold are one of the major problems of the current map 
style, they are selected to look fine for a certain area, usually the 
favorite city of the one making the style decision.  Choose a different 
area where the map scale is different or the geographic setting leads 
to a different distribution of POIs and things fall apart quickly.  

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/



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