[Tagging] RFC: Seaway key - proposal for mapping ports

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> On 6 Mar 2021, at 17:43, Bert -Araali- Van Opstal <bert.araali.afritastic at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> But in none of these there was a need identified to split between international or more localised facilities (all water bodies, inland, sea, oceans are just parts of the waterway ecosystem).  So I don't get it Martin, what should be a fundamental argument to make a split in this case.


as I said I am not an expert in this field, but from my understanding, river boats and ocean going vessels are built differently, due to different conditions they face. Ships going on rivers will have less draft, because the water is shallow and because there aren’t many waves, while low draft is not so important for ocean going vessels but stability is more an issue because of the rougher conditions. I didn’t make up the distinction between a seaport and a riverport, it is from what I know a common distinction, although there are edge cases where inland waterways are built or improved to allow ship with more draft to go inwards for loading and unloading, but these will
still be either very few exceptional passages (canals like the Panama or Suez canal) or relatively close to the coast and still be part of the maritime world even if they are not literally by the sea.

My main impetus was to suggest a better alternative to tagging ports with landuse (and generally there was nothing for fishing ports, ferries are reduced to terminals, seamark tagging is a weird parallel world with almost no interaction with the rest of OpenStreetMap tagging, and semantically (“mark”) odd, harbours are inappropriately equalized with ports, in total it is more mess than in any other field we are engaging).

Cheers Martin