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

[Anders Torger]

It's actually true, in my mapping don't need that many extra tags. 
Here's a report from the top of my head from my recent mapping:

- The peninsula tag exists but is not rendered
- Valley tag exists but is not rendered, and use as an area is rare, I 
most often need it as an area
- Named ridges can be very wide, I always make them as lines currently, 
but  areas would be more approriate in many cases
- Plateau exists as a proposal, not widespread use.
- I discovered that Fell is being used for naming slopes on hills, but 
due to its dual use as a landcover it's complicated.
- Forests, wetlands etc that today can be named and rendered often has 
complex geometry so a separate polygon
   on top with the name would be a more friendly concept for the mapper, 
and work better when there is mixed natural types
- Bay and strait exists and renders, fuzzy areas I frequently get to 
use.

There are other aspects as well, but these are those I come up with 
related to "fuzzy" areas.

The reason I wanted a separate strategic discussion on this is because 
when I do my research on these areas and why they are not rendered and 
some are rendered, I see lots and lots of friction (even without me 
involved ;-) ), similar to what we see in this thread, and I as a mapper 
feel uneasy with putting in data in our collaborative database that 
potentially a significant part of the community will just hate. I mean 
there are at least a few that would like to remove rendering for bays 
and strait areas and have this fuzzy area use simply to stop.

I'd like to come to some sort of consensus, either stop doing these 
fuzzy areas, or do it in some other way, or continue and actively 
develop the current feature set to fill in gaps there are and get some 
more tags approved. I'm not very keen on inventing my own schemas 
"behind the back" of the community, but I'm sort of starting to realize 
that maybe that is actually how OSM is intended to work, this "free 
tagging" concept. Free tagging is great in many ways, but has the 
drawback we can get more than one tag for the same thing or more than 
one use for a single tag (there are a number of examples), so I'd like 
to use something that is a bit agreed upon.

Anyway, if possible I as a mapper would like to work in an as "official" 
way as possible, preferably only using approved tags.

I name forests by making a polygon cutouts of an appropriate "fuzzy" 
size and tag it, this way there is no overlap. It works most of the 
time. I can't help that it feels "unofficial" to do so, as I am adding a 
fuzzy area in there although just not as a polygon on top. It also gets 
more complicated when there are more than one nature type, I had an 
example a while back with a name wetland with both bog and marsh. If 
fuzzy areas had been a more established concept, both these should 
probably more often be solved just by layering a naming polygon on top. 
Here's one example:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/12029528#map=14/66.8042/20.1197

The shape of the polygon is more complicated than it needed to be, it's 
adapted to having to avoid cutting the wetlands in half. Had it been a 
polygon on top it would be more evenly shaped and overlap some wetland 
slightly. It's actually a bit unclear to me when we need to make cutouts 
(ie make it as an inner in a multipolygon), and when it's okay to layer 
on top. I use JOSM and OSM-Carto as guides, no warnings from JOSM and 
renderering that looks ok in OSM-Carto is what I go for.

Thanks for your examples very interesting! As far as I understand, a few 
of them are quite controversial though, like the natural=plain polygon 
on top. I see the need for it and cannot say how it would be solved 
otherwise, but it is a type of mapping that I currently do not dare to 
do myself.

You are right the term "fuzzy area" is a bit too generic, a bit too 
fuzzy if you will, I haven't been able to come up with something better 
though... suggestions welcome.

/Anders

On 2020-12-22 12:09, Florian Kratochwil wrote:

> I've been reading with great interest in Anders' E-Mails and the 
> resulting discussions about naming nature. It is a topic i wish OSM 
> improves on.
> 
> I have two points:
> 
> 1) I don't know what everybody means with "fuzzy" and without that its 
> impossible to discuss it.
> 2) I think, in most cases there you can just map the things with 
> existing tags as areas. Many names will be rendered by some renderers. 
> Maybe, Anders, you need one or two new tags, because you find nothing 
> to fit --> Just create a new tag and show us the object.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20201222/4fb9c043/attachment.htm>