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

[Anders Torger]

Indeed, place=locality seems to be a dead end, it's been misused quite 
much and there's talks about removing it from OSM-Carto, and you can't 
render good maps from it, so it's technically a poor concept as well. To 
render names properly for natural features the renderer needs to know 
the extent of the area, so when you zoom out it can sort and show labels 
at appropriate size (and advanced renderers can even bend and shape the 
names according to the containing area), just like it has always worked 
with lakes.

Another way would be to make tags like we have for populated places, 
hamlet, villages, etc where the name tag type decides its prominence. 
This makes sense for populated areas as the area size is not what 
decides its prominence but rather the population size. However for 
natural features I think the area concept is elegant, and also gives 
much more information than just having a tag, as for natural features 
it's not always obvious (like a city) where the feature roughly starts 
and ends, or even what it is. For natural features it's also common in 
cartography to shape the text according to the shape of the feature 
(there are a few examples of renderers doing this already with OSM 
lakes, like opentopomap.org), and having an area gives the renderer 
great information to work with. So I think named areas is the way to go 
for natural features.

Named areas on land, like the peninsula tag that exists today, makes the 
map data a bit crowded in the editor when you show all elements at once. 
I think it would work well enough as you just can filter them out in 
JOSM when editing other stuff, but the concept of named areas has got 
heavy criticism from leading OSM people so it seems to be impossible to 
get consensus for this in the main database. Peninsula and also the 
valley tags are ineffective due to this. Refusal to support/promote the 
feature in OSM hasn't meant that the names have disappeared from the 
real world though, so the need is still very much there. There just 
seems to be no way forward with the main database.

So the only viable option indeed seems to put these things in a separate 
database. Although I think it would be preferable to have this type of 
basic feature represented in the main database, I'm for anything that 
works.

However, how many mappers is willing to contribute to an extra database 
if there's no showcase of it actually being used in a map as accessible 
as osm.org? Wouldn't this database just fade away, just like so many 
OSM-related projects before it? I think that today map renderers has to 
lead the way showcasing great cartography, then mappers will follow. The 
other way around no longer works, the scope is just too big. As a 
mapper, I don't want to invent methods for basic mapping, I just want to 
go to a website and read how it should be done, do my mapping, and then 
see the result on a map freely accessible to anyone all over the world. 
To me that's the attraction of OSM and being a contributor. With a 
global scope of the map it's incredibly hard as in an individual mapper 
to start a geodata trend that grows and gets so big that some relevant 
render implementor actually starts using the data and show it on their 
maps.

Would it be possible to get a global map renderer tied to the project so 
the database is actually used? I think it will be next to impossible to 
grow the database with voluntary contributions if there is no map 
showing it in active use.

/Anders

On 2020-12-12 14:03, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:

> of course all of these could be tagged as place=locality nodes, but 
> this is a compromise to drop a name, which does not allow to even guess 
> about the extent,  shape or orientation.
> 
> My idea is to collectively curate a parallel dataset which can be used 
> in addition. Just draw the thing roughly (thinking mainly about 
> regional size features, not the very detailed OpenStreetMap editing map 
> scale), e.g. here
> geojson.io
> and send it to me for inclusion ;-)
> 
> https://github.com/dieterdreist/OpenGeographyRegions
> 
> ideally you would also search the fitting wikidata object (the hope is 
> to internationalize names through wikidata items).
> 
> Cheers Martin
> 
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