[Tagging] Fuzzy areas again: should we have them or not?

[Anders Torger]

Sorry, forgot to add that an alternative to fuzzy areas would be to do 
like hamlet/village/town/city etc and have a bunch of these point names 
for various natural features that we could place out instead of fuzzy 
areas. Do you think that is better?

That combined with an external database for huge areas ("the Alps") 
would fulfill most needs. Shaping text for the small fuzzy areas is not 
really much of a thing so point naming would be satisfactory, but would 
be quite many tags that needs introducing, while the fuzzy area is more 
a continuation of areas that already exist and are to some extent 
already in use. I also think a fuzzy area does provide some valuable 
information and requires the mapper to make a healthy think over what 
the name actually refers to and covers, and avoids the issue of "which 
tag size to use".

That said, I would pick hierarchical point naming over nothing any day.

/Anders

On 2020-12-21 19:30, Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging wrote:

> Dec 21, 2020, 16:42 by zelonewolf at gmail.com:
> 
> On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 8:01 AM Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> 
> wrote:
> 
> Our current data model is not suitable for mapping fuzzy areas. We can
> only do "precise". Also, as you correctly pointed out, or basic tenet 
> of
> verifiability doesn't work well with fuzzy data.
> 
> The current data model works just fine for fuzzy areas: it requires a 
> polygon combined with tagging that indicates that the area is "fuzzy".  
> Since the current data model allows both polygons and tags, fuzzy areas 
> could be mapped just fine from a technical standpoint.

Bigger problem is that with things like mountain ranges there are 
multiple differing opinions
about borders.

For example in case of https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beskid_Wyspowy 
multiple authors
give precise, unfuzzy borders (specific rivers or roads).

But different authors prefer different borders.

See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_of_the_oceans
and 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_between_the_continents_of_Earth
for other kind of differences. Modelling this is not fitting well how 
OSM works.

>> So the one questions is, do we want fuzzy areas, the other is, if we
>> want them, how can they be established - because in our current 
>> database
>> they cannot.
>> 
>> I think fuzzy areas make a lot of sense for cartography, but I 
>> strongly
>> object to people adding hand-wavy polygons to OSM for fuzzy areas.
> 
> "Whether we want fuzzy areas" and "how they can be established" is 
> certainly an open question that requires additional intellectual 
> thought and consensus-building to achieve.  However, the statement that 
> they "cannot" be established in our database is simply an opinion, not 
> a technical barrier.

I would not say cannot, but it is extremely poor fit to OSM data model 
and how
OSM operates.

> The statement that fuzzy polygons is "damaging" is an argument not 
> based in fact.  It is not damaging to me to have building outlines, 
> which I do not care about.  I can simply ignore them.  Likewise, fuzzy 
> areas cause no damage to people that do not care about fuzzy areas, 
> provided that there is tagging that distinguishes them from non-fuzzy 
> areas.

It is not so easy. Someone mapped several fuzzy areas in my regions and 
all of
them are extremely irritating while mapping.

Building outlines are not stretching for hundreds of kilometers and do
not appear in places where there is nothing at all and building outlines
are verifiable unlike mess like 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1757627
and other from https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/11pc

Some day I will need to check whatever it is also one big copyright 
violation
(for now I just left questions at ancient changesets that added this 
mess).

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