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

Joseph Eisenberg joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com
Mon Dec 14 20:45:48 UTC 2020


Re; "Don't adjust your mapping to what you believe is most convenient for
data users"

I know this recommendation is unpopular with some mappers, because many of
us just want to see a good-looking map, and if it takes duplicating
relations and extra mapping work we will do it.

But remember that your time as a mapper, even though you give it to
OpenStreetMap freely, is actually valuable and should never be wasted on
doing things that can be solved by better software on the database user end
of things.

We should never ask 10,000 mappers to spend 10 hours a year each to add
something to the database which saves 10 hours of work for a database user.

Sometimes this means that the rendering on openstreetmap.org won't look
perfect, but we can expect better results in the future with more advanced
renderers. Consider for example how OpenTopoMap has really great
natural=peak and natural=saddle rendering, which uses elevation and
topography to adjust the rendering to look good with the contour lines and
different zoom levels. This is somewhat complex, but it was done by an
open-source, free map style.

Once upon a time I planned to add prominece=* tags to all the peaks in my
area so I could get good rendering results, but the solution which
OpenTopoMap uses is much better: it's fully automated and fast. Adding the
topographic prominence to every natural=peak to get better rendering is a
huge waste of mapper time, when you can instead calculate it (or better yet
the topographic isolation) at the time of rendering.

Similarly mappers shouldn't map a huge relation which includes all parts of
the water in a long river, since it is much easier to map and maintain
smaller closed ways for each short part of the river water. If database
users need one big area, they can pre-process the data to create the
polygons: don't make life harder for mappers to save the database users a
few CPU cycles.

Your time is priceless, fellow mappers. The time of database users is
usually a business expense.

-- Joseph Eisenberg

On Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 10:44 AM Christoph Hormann <osm at imagico.de> wrote:

>
>
> > Anders Torger <anders at torger.se> hat am 14.12.2020 15:49 geschrieben:
> >
> > Okay, but why does the OSM-Carto renderer, and all other renderers known
> > to man(?) make multiple text labels then, when it should be a single
> > one?
>
> OSM-Carto renders labels primarily based on the following constraints:
>
> * due to the requirement of real time updates more complex operations are
> severely restricted.  Clustering features, aggregating the clusters
> geometry-wise and labeling the aggregates are such operations.
> * we want the relationship between the data in the database and the
> rendering results to be intuitively understandable for the mapper so they
> can derive useful feedback from the map.  That also limits the complexity
> of data processing we can use.
> * like all zoomable interactive maps OSM-Carto has to deal with the
> problem that high quality labeling is zoom level dependent.  At the same
> time having different approaches to labeling at different zoom levels adds
> a lot of complexity to the style - and OSM-Carto is already one of the most
> complex map styles in existence.  Hence compromises are made that look
> better on some zoom levels than on others.
>
> As far as other map styles are concerned - i have said that before: high
> quality cartography is expensive and the bulk of the digital map market is
> low quality and low price - hence requires low costs.  And the willingness
> to engage in strategic investment in methods for high quality cartography
> in the wider OSM ecosystem as well as in the open source GIS sector is so
> far rather small.
>
> What can you do as a mapper:  Produce an accurate representation of the
> geography that is non-complex in structure, is easy for you to map and
> maintain and that is consistent with how others map things and don't adjust
> your mapping to what you believe is most convenient for data users.
>
> --
> Christoph Hormann
> https://www.imagico.de/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tagging mailing list
> Tagging at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
>
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