[Tagging] RFC #2: Lake, pond, and reservoir proposal

[Brian M. Sperlongano]

On Sat, Jan 1, 2022 at 2:04 PM Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us>
wrote:

> It's a new year and only one talk entry as far as I know since you
> reopened this proposal.
>
> Like Imagico the lake/pond (and river/creek) tagging has never made sense
> to me. Imagico has other issues with lake/pond, but I'd like to see the
> tagging dropped. Because this is a spatial database the surface area of a
> water body can easily be calculated. If anywhere has a lake/pond definition
> based on surface size then they can easily quantify the waterbody. Since
> I've never seen such a definition I'd recommend dropping the tag
> altogether. However, I think lake/pond should be outside of the scope of
> the proposal.
>

Thanks for the note.  I had intended to launch a vote last week, but the
holidays this year had me busier than expected.  So I'll give it at least a
few more days to make sure that discussion is exhausted.

The question of removing the distinction between lake and pond was
suggested [1] by Jeisenbe in Nov 2020.  This was actually my preference in
that thread as well, as it would simplify the tagging of still water bodies
by not requiring mappers to adjudicate the difference between lake and pond
for edge cases.  However, in that thread, there was clear community support
for keeping both water=lake and water=pond.  Given that there are 800K
usages of water=lake and 1.4 million usages of water=pond, these tags
simply aren't going away any time soon.

On the references list and discussion page of the proposal page [2] is a
quite long history of the discussions that have shaped the ultimate
direction of this proposal.  In short, in order to properly define
"reservoir", it was necessary to define "lake" and draw a clear distinction
between two types of water bodies.  Given the obvious overlap between lake
and pond, defining lake necessarily meant formalizing the distinction
between each of these three tag values - reservoir, lake, and pond, with
the goal to capture and document as best as possible the actual, real-world
usage of these three tags.  With 2.7 million usages, we are certainly not
going to be redefining anything.  This means we end up with definitions
that do necessarily leave gray areas where mappers must make a "best
effort" attempt to apply the tagging that best fits, but water tagging is
hardly the only tagging that has a fuzzy boundary between values.

While my original intent was a narrow-scoped and simple deprecation of
landuse=reservoir, the need to also provide a formal definition for a
reservoir to apply the new tagging is the reason why lake, pond, and
reservoir definitions couldn't be reasonably separated in the proposal.

[1]
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2020-November/056183.html

[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Reservoir
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