[Tagging] natural=bay as nodes are evil

Christoph Hormann chris_hormann at gmx.de
Sun Oct 26 20:38:21 UTC 2014


On Sunday 26 October 2014, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> > Furthermore the outer edge of a bay, i.e. the edge that is not
> > coastline is usually not well defined and would require an
> > arbitrary cutoff.
>
> Yes, cutoff is unfortunately quite arbitrary. But node placement is
> completely arbitrary - and lacks important information.

I don't see what information is missing and cannot be easily determined 
automatically with a properly placed node that is contained in an 
area - except for the outer edge of course, which is usually 
ill-defined though as you said yourself.

If you think about it a bit and do not try to place the node where you 
would place the label (which depends on the map projection anyway) 
properly placing a node for a bay is usually quite simple.  The most 
difficult are long, fjord-like bays where a way along them would be 
more appropriate.

Specific arguments aside - i am not sure if you realize the consequences 
it would have if subareas of oceans would generally be mapped as 
polygons - large bays usually contain smaller bays and are parts of a 
sea and there might be a strait between an island and the coast within 
that bay.  If you want to edit the coastline in such situation you 
would end up having to deal with a handful of convoluted multipolygon 
relations, some of them of colossal size.  Properly editing coastlines 
is difficult for beginners in the first place.  This would make it 
borderline impossible.

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



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