[Tagging] Maritime=yes for marine river estuaries?

[Christoph Hormann]

On Thursday 09 May 2019, Joseph Eisenberg wrote:
> I discovered that maritime=yes has been used about 100 to 150 times
> to tag areas of river estuaries that should be considered part of the
> marine environment.
>
> [...]

I introduced this tag for this purpose to indicate water polygons where 
mappers insist on closing the coastline outside of them even though 
they ecologically belong to the maritime domain and would be placed on 
the wet side of the coastline according to

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_Features/Coastline-River_transit_placement

By far the largest example of this is

https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/3474227

But there are countless other cases both with and without the maritime 
tag.  I have essentially stopped trying to maintain this information 
within OSM and use either heuristics based on the geometries or 
external data to draw the line between maritime and inland water areas.

This is immensely sad for OSMs ability to record even the most basic 
information about the physical geography of Earth.  But it is not 
really right to just blame mappers for this because the vast majority 
of data users also just don't care.

> But I wonder if it wouldn't be better to make a different tag for the
> usage on marine rivers and estuaries? This would make it possible to
> keep the tag marine=yes defined for use on administrative boundaries
> only.

I see no need for that since there are no collisions between the two - 
maritime boundaries are never geometrically identical to water 
polygons.  The tag maritime=yes is exactly fitting here - this is to 
indicate a water polygon ecologically belongs to the maritime domain.

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