[Tagging] The showstoppers for mapping Scandinavian nature.

Sat Dec 26 12:11:26 UTC 2020

Thank you Anders for your great effort on this topic! I believe, even if 
there was no "result" in your favor, your mails raised the level of 
importance of nature naming for osm-tagging-list-readers. Maybe this 
topic needs to rest a little, and in a second (or third) attempt it will 
get to a consensus.

I have more or less the same opinions on this topics like you. I wish 
there was a beautiful (aesthetic) map made out of osm data which renders 
named areas (natural, place, ...) and I bet sometime there will be such 
a thing. I am no rendering expert, but i know automated label placing is 
sooo difficult, i think there might not even be a technical solution to 
do it if you would want it.

As I wrote in my e-mail to the list, I just map polygons and name them, 
even if someone might be against it. For me, this is how osm works and 
(in contrast to you) I am happy if it is just in there. If I query it on 
osm.org, its outline is presented (every human recognizes the fuzzy 
parts and will conclude that their border is not sharp) and if I query a 
point inside, it says this point is inside this object. I dont need osm 
carto to render it to be happy. (Sidenote: I didnt get any responses 
where someone said my mapping examples were bad. You mentioning they 
might be controversial was the only reply I got. So I guess it is not as 
unwanted you think).

My hope is that sometime there will be a renderer which creates a 
beautiful outdoor map with named areas. I dont expect OSM Carto to be it 
for the following reasons:
1) OSM Carto needs to be fast. Calculating the optimal label placement 
is not fast.
2) OSM Carto has no hillshading. Without that it will never be a good 
outdoor map.

 From the renderers I know of, my hope lies in the opentopomap to be 
this map (it already is beautiful, but it doesn't render all names). As 
its few maintainers do it as a hobby, it might take some (a lot) time. 
So be it. Their (more or less) recent improvements (rotating 
natural=saddle according to the elevation data, labelling lakes) go in 
that direction.

Best Florian

Am 26.12.20 um 11:24 schrieb Anders Torger:
> After careful consideration I've decided to stop mapping nature, and 
> go back to casual road mapping like I did before. It's been intense 
> couple of months, made 600000 edits, reached place 24 in the world 
> board, 1st in Sweden (except a cleanup bot that fixed some vandalism 
> we've had in Sweden lately, which I was also involved in tracking 
> down). This is the most intense OSM mapping period I've ever had.
>
> In Sweden/Scandinavia we are since 60+ years used to having very good 
> maps available to the public, first in paper form and now also 
> digital. We have a rich outdoor culture, we are out hiking, hunting, 
> fishing, photographing, mountaineering, snowmobiling etc. I have 
> several paper maps of the areas I use to visit, and also an app with 
> the corresponding maps.
>
> However, while our local app and services use the geodata provided by 
> the government, any international service or app typically use OSM 
> data. That got me thinking, wouldn't it be cool if one could raise the 
> level of OSM data quality in Scandinavia so that it can work as a drop 
> in replacement for the maps we are used to?
>
> I didn't really expect that OSM or current renderers would be ready 
> out of the box, so there would be some gaps to fill in. Indeed there 
> were some gaps which lead to some interesting discussions on this list 
> and elsewhere.
>
> Unfortunately it turns out that it's impossible to fill these gaps, 
> and thus impossible to fulfill the goal I had. OSM-based maps will 
> never be able to replace our traditional maps, which in practice means 
> that when I use an OSM-based map I will still need to have an extra 
> app on the side with the real map to get complete coverage. That kills 
> my personal motivation to map Scandinavian nature with any sort of 
> detail, as it then just becomes a theoretical exercise with no 
> practical end goal.
>
> There are two show-stoppers that makes this impossible. Neither is 
> technical.
>
> One is that as OSM is only interested in providing a geo database it 
> makes it very hard to discuss geo services, such as maps. Limitations 
> in data representation that cause limitations in what geo services you 
> can implement are considered as non-issues as OSM doesn't prioritize 
> any of these services itself, and thus it's next to impossible to make 
> any kind of progress in these areas.
>
> The other more concrete showstopper is the purist interpretation of 
> the verifiability principle which makes it impossible to name nature 
> in a way that that can be rendered properly on a map. Confusingly 
> enough, some of this functionality has slipped in and is used in 
> practice (bays and straits), but turns out that's due to an individual 
> developer going against other developers' will, thus if it wouldn't 
> for a glitch in the development process it wouldn't be in.
>
> In Scandinavian rural nature we have about 5 - 10 of these names with 
> "undefined" borders per 10x10 km square, so it's more than a few. 
> Named sections of forests, named sections of water, named sections of 
> a mountain or hill, named sections of broad ridges, named peninsulas, 
> named valleys (often extremely wide), named plateaus, long streams 
> which in some undefined place change name, huge wetlands which in some 
> undefined place change name, etc.
>
> According to the purist interpretation of verifiability all these 
> should be named as points of undefined size, or maybe in some cases as 
> a line. (Actually you could make a polygon of these natural areas 
> verifiable in the purist way, just by making it small enough so that 
> all points of the polygon is verifiably inside the area, but it's not 
> up for discussion)
>
> Point-naming nature in Scandinavia is only useful for very small 
> natural areas, say up to 500 meters span. As soon as the natural area 
> spans more than that a point without size information is not 
> sufficient for any data consumer can represent it properly in relation 
> to the small areas. With this type of data in the database it's 
> impossible to render a map with names in nature properly so you are 
> better off leaving them out alltogether.
>
> And that is what mappers have done in Scandinavia most of the time so 
> far, and also what I will do. Mapping nature with high detail but 
> leaving out names does not feel meaningful to me (as it still just 
> means that one will have to use a traditional map on the side), so I 
> will personally just stop doing landcovers alltogether.
>
> I will of course keep an eye on OSM and how it develops in the future, 
> so if its strategy evolves in a way that makes mapping of these 
> natural features meaningful I'll get back to work. Until then, I'll 
> only map the things that OSM can do in well-defined ways.
>
> I'll unsubscribe from the list now as I won't need to ask any 
> questions when mapping basic stuff, so if you need to reach me send an 
> email directly to me.
>
> /Anders
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tagging mailing list
> Tagging at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging