[Talk-ca] Bodies of seawater in Canada - area definitions

[Richard Fairhurst]

Nate Wessel wrote:
> If people don't want to consider the relation they can just query
> the point which will still be there. Literally no harm done. It's not
> like the database is running out of space; and if it is, we have
> bigger fish to fry!

It's not that simple, because people have to work with coastline data too.

For example, there are three types of natural=bay polygons that I've encountered in OSM. First, bay polygons that are entirely covered by coastline-delineated ocean. Second, bay polygons that contain some area not in the ocean. And third, bay polygons that not only cover the ocean/sea, but also some landmasses within it (e.g. islands).

Mappers have a tendency just to say "oh well it works on the osm.org rendering, so it must be fine". But not everyone uses openstreetmap-carto, not everyone uses osm2pgsql, and not everyone even uses PostGIS; what works in one toolchain may not work in another. Ambiguous polygons like this are a real, genuine pain to deal with.

David, if you do want to map these areas as polygons (and I wouldn't do it personally, but you do you), then please add an unambiguous tag by which we can identify that the bay is contiguous with the shoreline-delineated ocean.

Richard
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