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

[Brian M. Sperlongano]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 12:58 PM Joseph Eisenberg <
joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:


> So the best option for many of these features is to map the centre, rather
> than the edges: the center of the Sierra Nevada is the peaks along the
> highest ridge, and could reasonably be mapped as a natural=mountain_range
> way which follows all the highest ridges. The center of the Po valley is
> the Po river - this is already mapped, so I'm not sure that we need to
> represent it a second time. But some valleys are mapped as linear ways.
>
> The centre of a city is mapped as a node at the economic/cultural central
> point. While one might argue about whether the centre of Tokyo is on this
> street or another, the node placement is much more precise than any outer
> boundary in the suburbs, which could be debatable for 10s of kilometers
>
> The principle here is that we should map the most verifiable feature: when
> an area is fuzzy (the boundaries are not verifiable), it is often better to
> map the center as a node or linear way, when this can be agreed upon and
> confirmed to be correct by other mappers.
>

I would consider the center point to be a fine solution for expressing
rough _location_.  However, it lacks a notion of relative _size_.  A valley
might be tens of kilometers across, while an ocean might be thousands of
kilometers across.  It's still important to be able to express this
concept.  You could come up with rules like "oceans are roughly X size,
mountain ranges are roughly Y size, valleys are roughly Z size", but this
would only be an approximation for lack of information in the data model.
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