[Tagging] The saga of landuse=reservoir vs water=reservoir

Kevin Kenny kevin.b.kenny at gmail.com
Wed Dec 16 17:41:46 UTC 2020


On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 11:52 AM Joseph Eisenberg <
joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:

> Re: "natural=water' wins.  I can see that there's water there"
>
> You still have to distinguish marine water (outside of the
> natural=coastline) from inland waters, and distinguishing rivers from lakes
> is very important for proper rendering of many maps.
>

I do know that the coastline is a special case, and I know about the
'water=*' key. I fill a value in when I know the answer. I leave it out
when I don't.


> Also, many areas of natural=water actually don't have any water for much
> of the year, if they are also intermittent=yes - such as seasonal lakes in
> semi-arid areas.
>

I use that tag too.

I personally am not as concerned about water=reservoir for artificial
> lakes, but I am concerned that water=river is often forgotten when mapping
> areas of river water, where previously waterway=riverbank was clearly
> distinguished from lakes.
>
> Many map styles distinguish rivers and streams from lakes, since it is
> often helpful to use a darker color for narrow linear features.
>

That's fine. I can see that it's moving water and tag it appropriately.

If I have to figure out if a pond is karstic, glacial, man-made or
beaver-made before I can map it, it's likely to go unmapped. I can't always
see that from aerials and I can't always access the outlet to figure out
what's retaining the water.

We seem to be dividing into two camps here, as we do on many tagging
issues. One camp is, "we must have the highest possible quality. Everything
must be mapped perfectly or not mapped at all." The other is, "it's all
right to have some missing details, they can be filled in later. It's
better to fill in the picture with broad brush strokes and then go back to
add the details."    The perfectionists appear to support tagging schemata
that make it difficult to map without complete research. Both sides appear
to agree that doing the research is desirable. It comes down to an
apparently irreconcilable argument over whether it's worse to have an
incompletely characterized waterbody or a blank spot on the map.

With respect to water, another concern  of mine is that our tagging schema
does not offer any way to tag that there are rapids in a river without
knowing how to grade the difficulty of a canoe or kayak run. That's a case
where the voted-on tagging requires perfect mapping before the data can be
entered at all - and when I mentioned that once before, I was put down with
"if you don't understand it, don't map it." I understand it well enough to
know that as a greenwater canoeist, I'll want to portage around it. I can
see the whitewater. I cannot grade it safely. Here, however, the community
consensus appears to have settled on the perfectionist approach, so I don't
map rapids.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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