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

[Anders Torger]

Sorry for perhaps adding further complexity, but if you haven't noted, 
one thing that crawls under the surface when it comes to names in nature 
is this "holy" principle:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Verifiability

Names of natural features often don't have strict borders. Wetlands as 
in this example is typically quite defined, but there are cases also in 
Muddus when the wetland is so large that it has one name in one end and 
another name in the other. So I have to split the wetland at some point 
I find "suitable". That is not verifiable, there's never been a defined 
border, and another mapper could choose a slightly different split line. 
I don't see it as a big issue, as long as renderers don't render and 
outline these borders, but I can "read between the lines" that some on 
this list do.

However fuzzy borders like this is not some narrow special case. Names 
in nature is very often this way, and many names have survived from 
times when the civilization weren't even much bothered by such borders 
at all. In lakes and sea we have a lot of these too of course, and there 
the fuzzy areas bay and strait actually do exist and serves the 
cartography well, but not without protests... I've seen desire to have 
these removed completely.

I think OSM should either strive support nature naming as it works in 
reality (and document how to tag), or make a clear statement that names 
of this type should not exist in the database. I think the latter would 
be sad, but at the same time I find it extremely frustrating to get what 
I experience as "passive opposition" when I bring up these kind of 
needs.

A clear statement would be nicer. On the verifiability page above there 
actually are is an example of fuzzy areas and that those can be accepted 
(hamlet used as an example). Nature naming is not discussed though.

/Anders

On 2020-12-14 10:41, Anders Torger wrote:

> For reference, here's Rijmmoáhpe again, a wetland which is about 4 km 
> across, consisting of both bog and marsh:
> 
> https://www.torger.se/anders/downloads/Screenshot_2020-12-13-OpenStreetMap.png
> 
> It's located in Muddus national park, Sweden.
> 
> I'm quite sure the recommendation Christoph refers to is simply to put 
> names on each separate part, which is seen in the screenshot. It's 
> unclear to me if this is seen by Christoph and others as a final and 
> good solution, or just as "the best we can do for the moment". So I 
> hope to get a clarification on that.
> 
> Personally I see it as "the best we can do for the moment", but think 
> that it of course should be rendered as a single name, and as such the 
> name tag should not really be on each separate part, but on a relation. 
> Sure a renderer could trace around and scan for neighboring areas with 
> the same name and automatically, calculate the area of each part to 
> find out the dominant nature type (required for name tag styling), and 
> place a single name, but to me it does not seem like a proper way to 
> arrange geo data for a single named natural entity.
> 
> So what I have done in addition is to create a relation with 
> type=natural; natural=wetland; name=Rijmmoáhpe with all the parts as 
> members (role field unset). If that is just too controversial, I can 
> skip that and leave with just naming the parts. I planned to do that at 
> first, but as some of these natural features are quite heavily 
> fragmented in small pieces just for a management point of view in JOSM 
> I found this relation to be practical thing to have, so I added it.
> 
> There's a whole family of unanswered questions regarding to names of 
> nature. If Martin's fuzzy area concept was accepted and used 
> https://github.com/dieterdreist/OpenGeographyRegions maybe many of 
> these features would use that instead. Or maybe if place=locality 
> concept on points was developed and diversified that could be used 
> instead. I don't have any strong opinions on which method to use, I 
> just want to be able to map with high detail and high quality and use 
> any method that works.
> 
> On 2020-12-14 10:05, Ture Pålsson via Tagging wrote:
> 
> 13 dec. 2020 kl. 16:15 skrev Christoph Hormann <osm at imagico.de>:
> I am trying to understand what the issue is with the recommendation for 
> mapping you have received from multiple sides here.
> Just to clarify, could you summarise what that recommendation is, for 
> the Rijmmoáhpe case? The thread has become a little unwieldy (partially 
> my fault... sorry about that!).
> 
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