[Talk-us] Beaver dam? Wrecked bridge? Hallucinatory roads in TIGER?

Kevin Kenny kkenny2 at nycap.rr.com
Sat Dec 20 19:25:12 UTC 2014


On 12/20/2014 11:36 AM, Harald Kliems wrote:
> highway=service;service=beaver;pedestrian=permissive (assuming that it's
> nice beavers)

I didn't meet the beavers. They were busy. You know beavers. One dam
project after another. :)
>
> More seriously: Does it really matter that the way leads over a beaver
> dam? On the linked picture it looks like a regular trail to me (no wet
> feet or anything) and I'd just tag it as such. I guess in addition you
> could tag the beaver dam itself.

I think that the cutesy 'ford=beaver_dam' might actually be appropriate.
What I'm trying to convey by tagging it is that the trail actually does
cross the dam. The picture doesn't convey the situation well, sorry!
The way the area is trodden suggests that almost everyone tries up- and
downstream first before realizing that the trail really does cross.

As far as wet feet go, on that trail, by the time you're that far in,
you have wet feel already. Guaranteed. You'll be walking along what
looks like an ordinary trail and all of a sudden sink into peat above
your boot tops. I fell in whitewater once and bogwater twice getting
my GPS tracks, which span only half the trail.

http://kbk.is-a-geek.net/catskills/test2.html?la=44.0756&lo=-74.2810&z=13 gives 
a feel for how soggy that general area is. It
includes several data layers that are not OSM: NHD, NED, and several
layers from the Adirondack Park Agency. And probably a few layers
that I'm failing to remember. Where two shorelines are shown, they
represent typical limits of seasonal inundation. Dashed blue boundaries
around wetlands represent ephemerally inundated emergent marsh.

I considered at one point
embarking on an import of APA's wetland and waterway polygons, to fill
in the largely blank map of the park, but decided against it for
a number of reasons:

(a) I didn't have a strategy for reconflation to maintain the data
moving forward.
(b) I wasn't entirely comfortable with even the generous license terms.
(To wit: These data may not be used for legal determinations. Please
credit use of this data set to the New York State Adirondack Park
Agency, Ray Brook, New York 12977.  Please send a copy of any reports
or papers in which these data were used or referenced to the above
address, Attention: Nancy Heath Librarian.)
(c) I was thinking about it at a time when a lot of discussion on
the imports mailing list was about how all imports are bad, because
they discourage the recruitment of new mappers.
(d) I decided I really didn't have time even to manage conflating the
data with even the sketchy stuff that's already in OSM.
(e) Detailed hydrographic data is probably outside OSM's ambit anyway.
I don't want to be accused of cluttering the map.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin



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