[Tagging] Basic cartography features missing, why?
Anders Torger
anders at torger.se
Sat Nov 7 17:14:23 UTC 2020
Hello Steve,
thanks for that wonderful and inspiring post! I'll surely think about
doing-what-can-be-done-with-the-current-tools-at-hand, and think about
that the work can be built upon by others in the future. Most inspiring!
And I'll also clarify, I don't expect some Swiss cartographic artwork to
come out of the renderer. But I do think that OSM could go a lot further
in that direction, and should strive to do so. That needs strategic
high-level decisions. If cartographic renderings becomes a priority,
other design decisions will follow. Now when many other factors are of
higher priority, no improvement will happen.
I will continue to be a casual mapper as long as the bike routing tools
I use use OSM. I'm an egoistic contributor in that regard, I do it
because I need have direct use for the data myself. I also map the
places I grew up in and love, and I have a specific connection to rural
areas (although I live in city now) so I do work there to, makes me feel
good. Some do handicraft as relaxing hobby, and mapping is my
handicraft.
As I described in a different post, here in Sweden OSM doesn't have a
particular strong position as the alternatives has come strong the past
5 - 7 years. OSM didn't reach a good baseline here before interest went
down due to easily and cheaply accessible alternatives, so we are in a
tricky situation. We need mappers and it's hard to convince regular
people to contribute to OSM, "why do that when high quality maps are
free?". I've written open-source software since the 1990s, so the open
license thing is an easy sell to me, but to regular people the ideology
bit doesn't really work. I haven't done a survey, but my theory is that
the typical contributor here do it as a sort of pleasing handicraft.
To make it pleasing the resulting product should be good, and I think
there is more to do there, not the least for rural areas where the
naming issues is most evident.
/Anders
On 2020-11-07 13:30, stevea wrote:
> On Nov 6, 2020, at 1:51 PM, Anders Torger <anders at torger.se> wrote:
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