[Tagging] Using multipolygons to map bays in Alaska

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 15.11.2018 12:08, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> I think it is good you bring this up because many mappers have been 
> doing exactly that without asking - See for example:
> 
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/548210592
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/544856564

Frankly, while I share your overall criticism of 'polygons is
universally the preferred way of mapping no matter if verifiable or not'
and 'way_area equals cartographic importance', I recently found that
someone had added a huge natural=bay relation for the Bay of Bothnia,
meticuously including every coastline way.

I deleted it here

https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/63455985

but not without attracting questions as you can see, and I fear that
with osm-carto as it is, this object will rise from the dead sooner or
later.

I still think that it is ridiculous to slap a ton of multipolygons onto
the coastlines (since, as I write in that discussion, many bits of water
are actually part of various bays of different scales), and a coarse
"labelling polygon" like the one discussed here would seem to me to do
*less* harm.

> Long story short:  My suggestion is and has always been to map bays with 
> nodes in those cases where this - together with the coastline - 
> perfectly documents the verifiable information available on the 
> geometry of the bay.

Agree on the node idea, but it would have to include some size signifier
(and I think someone recently tried to add a "sqm" tag to water body
nodes for that purpose which I also criticised...). I don't think you
are recommending a relation that includes the actual coastline and the
label node, but if you do then I am against that because I don't want
every coastline to be part of 10 relations in the end.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"