[Tagging] Basic cartography features missing, why?

[Tomas Straupis]

2020-11-07, št, 13:24 Anders Torger rašė:
> However, and this is a big however, I think that the face of
> openstreetmap really need to be a cartographic sound map.

  During personal meetings as well as during different presentations
in conferences I've been showing people two maps (one was google,
another one was swiss topo https://map.geo.admin.ch). Google is one of
the worst (from cartographic perspective) and Swiss topo is one of the
best (Generalisation book of Swiss cartographers is like a magic
book). And surprisingly (or not) a lot of people still prefer google
style maps (at least for on-screen maps where you can zoom). In this
year's SOTM Baltic the audience was split roughly 50/50 between
google/swiss topo. So it is not clear which is better even if we do
not think about technical difficulties.

> And howcome did I not even know about this cartographic project of yours?

  Because it only covers Lithuania, because it is done as part of
Lithuanian fellowship of cartographers, not international.

> I assume that many, perhaps most, casual mappers use the web editor.

  Most edits are done with the main OSM editor which is - JOSM.

> I'm
> really impressed with the web editor, it's great and is mostly
> user-friendly,

  And is very prone to damage good data. We (in Lithuania) encourage
everybody to switch away from iD as soon as possible.

  Also note that cartographic style needs even more stuff, not only
hardware and ideas (most generalisation tasks are not solved because
algorithms are not designed/crystalised, coding is the least of the
problems). In order to do good cartography you would have to agree on
a much stricter use of tags and sometimes push some things into
tagging which a lot of participants of this mailing list could
disagree - for example road network hierarchy. Fuzzy features (like
continents, mountain ranges, bays etc. should probably be moved to a
separate database).

-- 
Tomas