[talk-au] Mapping surf breaks

[Josh Marshall]

tl;dr - I’m interested in getting more surfing-centric tagging into OSM, hopefully leading to an open surfing map. And want to check on what would be appropriate. In an analogous way to how cycling is treated, along with trail running, my own sports of choice.


The long story:
My teenage son is quite the avid bodyboarder, and we just got back from at weekend at the Aussie national championships in Port Macquarie… Which leads into me realising as I try to wrap my head around the sport, that there’s very little surfing-centric content in OSM. Doubly strange in Australia. And we’re homeschooling, so… hello geography, cartography, environment, etc, lessons.

I printed out a map of our local (Newcastle) beaches using fieldpapers.org, and got him to draw them in, then uploaded it.  The FP page is here: https://fieldpapers.org/snapshots/ubcffu8v but that doesn’t seem to display the output properly, download the geotiff to view. Here’s the map tiles of it: http://tiles.fieldpapers.org/snapshots/ubcffu8v/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

I looked up what was already present in OSM, and it centres on the tag sport=surfing, https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:sport%3Dsurfing 
According to the overpass query https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1lgi it is already applied to a few surf breaks (sometimes not very precisely), surf shops, venues, and learn-to-surf organisations. I will explore more thoroughly.

Are there any concerns on me taking the idea and running with it? It would be good at least to flesh out the wiki page on what tags can or should be applied. I already have a spreadsheet from the grommie on the various attributes of a surf break (left and right waves, tide/swell/wind required). Does this require a formal proposal? 

My own pause relates to how even though surf breaks are physical locations (would be mapped as either areas or points), they are tied to underwater features and topography such as reefs, not necessarily visible from the surface. And so will rely heavily on local knowledge. But if not rendered by default, there’s no problem with that, right?
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