[Tagging] How to put a name tag on an area with more than one type?

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> On 12. Dec 2020, at 12:26, Anders Torger <anders at torger.se> wrote:
> 
> In the wetland case as described, there is no parent relation at all. The only thing that ties them together is implicitly by sharing borders and having the same name tag. It seems to me that an "official" way to edit should tie them together with a parent relation.


Yes, we do not have a way to map toponyms for larger areas when we also want to map detailed landcover within. Christoph’s idea of using the same names on the parts fails when the individual parts have different names. We can’t map bigger geographic entities like deserts, swamplands, forests, highlands (besides the names for the smallest parts, or if they correspond to other entities with clear boundaries like nature reserves, or maybe by overlapping the same kind of objects, what is generally frowned upon)


> 
> The logical way would be a parent relation with type=wetland (and actually have the name only there, but no renderer today understands that, it needs to be on the separate parts as well). What should the roles be? The most logical way would be to leave role field empty.



Maybe a similar approach as the one for relations of type=group (i.e. a relation type which explicitly “inherits” its meaning from the members without the requirement but with the possibility for additional tags, a place to put a name for the ensemble) could be taken for area relations as well, e.g. the site relation could include the different wetlands, and a name (and e.g. wikipedia/wikidata reference, etc.) might be sufficient to map the “collective” of things? The nature would be implied by its members.

The bigger such geographic entities become, the less you will typically be able to draw a hard line (fuzzyness of many natural borders, rather smooth transitions). If we want to map all those “meta areas” with names we would do well to think about additional ways of delimiting space (i.e. different kind of geometry objects), e.g. a fuzzy border could be represented by providing different points for which it seems undisputed that they are in or out of the area in question. This would be very lightweight for all mappers, because it avoids clear lines which are confusing when they do not correspond with something observable. It may be difficult to find these things though (obviously would require editor/tool support).


Cheers Martin