[talk-au] waterway=coastline

[David Groom]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Watson" <peter.bmwk75rt at gmail.com>
To: <talk-au at openstreetmap.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2011 10:40 AM
Subject: [talk-au] waterway=coastline


> Hi Everyone,
> I have noticed that all the Gold Coast canals are taged with
> waterway=coastline. I understand that the coastline should connect around
> the coastline in an unbroken line. ie. should connect across the river 
> where
> it meets the sea. I understand the canals should be done with tag
> waterway=riverbank probably as relations. Is this correct?
> Thanks
> Peter Watson
>
>
Peter

I assume you are referring to areas such as 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-28.01742&lon=153.41865&zoom=16

Since I created many of the canals in this area, and tagged them as waterway 
= coastline here are my thoughts.

Coastline nodes and ways were originally imported using PGS data.  This had 
relatively poor resolution and the result back in 2007 was a mess.

Using yahoo imagery I tidied up the location of the ways, tracing them as 
best I could.  At that time it was easiest to maintain the natural=coastline 
tag on these ways as it preserved an unbroken run of coastline as I edited.

I never changed these to waterway = riverbank tagging.  In part that was due 
to:

a) My intention was to get the map looking right. I was fixing errors 
identified by the coastline error checker, and once the errors were fixed I 
didn't bother to think about the tagging.  I was after all running imports 
on other parts of the globe, and trying to fix errors there as well.

b) Back in 2007 there was less consensus  than there is today about which 
ways should be tagged as natural = coastline.

For what its worth, if today  I were tagging the area I referred to above, 
I would  use of waterway = riverbank on the majority of these canals.

David