[Talk-GB] Streams & rivers

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

On Tuesday 06 March 2007 20:25:16 Russell Phillips wrote:
> Earlier today, I used the WMS plugin & NPE maps to start improving my
> map of Maltby [1]. However, I'm not sure how to tag Maltby Dike, which
> is a tiny stream. The NPE map [2] clearly shows it as a minor stream,
> but the only relevant tag I could find on the Map Features page [3] is
> waterway:river.
>
> This is misleading, and Osmarender renders it very wide, which would be
> reasonable for a river, but looks wrong for such a tiny little stream.
> Is there any way to tag such waterways so that Osmarender depicts them
> as small streams, rather than full rivers?

I've been using waterway=stream at times, which I'm sure is standard and is 
supported in Osmarender, although I'm not sure when to use stream or river.

I started mapping in Reading, and there the Thames is already quite wide. When 
I came to St Albans the River Ver is much, much narrower but also not really 
a stream. Marking it as a river makes it far too fat on the Osmarender maps, 
so I'm tempted to keep it as a stream. I suppose we could do with some 
gradations in between, as the OS and others seem to have, without requiring 
me to go out and measure the cross-section every 50m down the course of the 
waterway!

This has been discussed at length elsewhere, but I'm now inclined to agree 
with the proposal for having a width attribute that can be very rough (5m 
wide for a 2km stretch) or very detailed, whatever people want to enter at 
the time. At least being able to show that the Ver is nothing like the Thames 
nor the little streams that feed into the Colne to the South would be useful.

Regards,
Tom

-- 
| Green Party Speaker on Intellectual Property and Free Software |
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