[OSM-talk] Tagging Seamarks

Bernhard R. Fischer bf at abenteuerland.at
Wed Aug 18 10:06:09 BST 2010


On Tuesday 17 August 2010 23:54:55 you wrote:
> Bernhard R. Fischer wrote:
> > For a long time now I am interested in tagging seamarks.....(short
> > version)
> 
> Same here. I always knew that there wasn't anything near to consensus about
> much of anything on that front though, with a lot of bad blood in the
> German OSM community, which is one of the reasons why I shied away from
> getting involved until about now.
> 
> Very frustrating situation indeed.
> 
> > Now I found out that there are two comparable but different and competing
> > tagging schemes:
> > 
> > * http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/marine-tagging
> > * http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Lights_Data_Model
> > 
> > The first one is used by freietonne.de the second one by openseamap.org.
> > Consequently, there exist two disjoint marine maps.
> 
> Right.
> 
> New information (at least, new to some, including me) has surfaced on the
> German [Talk-de] OSM mailing list that says (paraphrasing) the first
> mentioned is the one and only "official" proposal (incidentally also used
> by FT, FreieTonne.de). The second link you mentioned is part of the scheme
> of the other project (OSeaM, openseamap.org).
> 
> So it would appear that we actually have
> * one official proposal, currently under discussion (also used by FT)
> * one private scheme, with private tags (exclusively used by OSeaM)
> 
> Now, the thing is I'm not really sure about this assessment. What I wrote
> above is my current understanding of the situation, which may be wrong.
> I'd appreciate input from FT or OSeaM project members on this matter, or
> really from anyone at all!
> 
> > This is extremely frustrating!
> > Computers do not care about attribute names and we shouldn't also as long
> > as both schemes fulfill the same requirements.
> 
> This is not just a naming issue. The tagging concepts of the schemes are
> rather different (contrary to what has been alleged somewhere on the
> Wiki).
> 
> There seems to be a lot of half knowledge and smattering among some of
> those who wrote on the Wiki on marine topics in the past, which of course
> is very conductive to misunderstandings. I believe this is part of what
> fuelled the conflicts between FT and OSeaM back then (but I was an
> observer in those conflicts only, so what do I know :) ).
> 
> Anyway, one thing I find particularly remarkable is that on just about
> every one of the Wiki pages, someone wrote something about that this
> tagging scheme "followed" IHO standard S-57, and how important and cool
> that would be, while actually (and thankfully), none of those schemes even
> come close to S-57.
> 
> S-57 is basically a soon-to-be-obsolete, proprietary and binary file
> format, so "following" it wouldn't really make a lot of sense for OSM. Not
> sure why so many people wrote that. Perhaps someone on this list is able
> to enlighten me?
> 
> Cheers,
> Arne

Arne,

I'm a little bit more into details of all that, yet.
The approaches of FT and OpenSeamap are a little bit different. OpenSeamap uses 
the OSM database exclusively while FT has its own database (as far as I 
understood) and they put just some pieces of information into the OSM 
database. Also FT puts just an overlay on top of the Openstreetmap map but 
Openseamap completely renders a seamap with focus on seamap features.

Regarding the tagging schemes. Openseamap uses this "proprietary" seamark:*=* 
scheme but FT uses just a subset of the official proposal. There is page which 
documents it:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:FreieTonne/Symbole
(It is in German but if you take a brief overview you'll partially understand 
it (German words: Bake=beacon, Tonne=buoy, 
Leuchtfeuer=light,Rot=red,Weiß=white,Grün=green)).
This is the reason why I personally favor Openseamap more than FT. In 
addition, FT is focused more on inland waterways.

 A further question for me is what is "official" and what is "private"?
Both of those tagging schemes are similar although the structure is different, 
as you mentioned. And, what is IMO much more important, the Openseamap scheme 
is already rendered on OpenSeamap which is not true for the other one and I 
stick with the opinion of the Openseamp guys: a seamap should be rendered 
different than a street map because different objects are important.

However, as an IT guy I prefer the Openseamp scheme to the offical one because 
it is more modular from a technical point of view. Thus, I hope that people 
out there do not still ignore the Openseamap scheme. After all, I translated 
it into English ;)

Regarding S-57: I think what they mean is that they orient on the S-57 schemes 
in respect to which attributes exist on which objects.

Best regards,
Bernhard
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 490 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20100818/c7d30a62/attachment.pgp>


More information about the talk mailing list