[OSM-talk] Tagging Seamarks

[Christian Wagner]

> Andreas Labres wrote:
> > Continuing dispute between the two groups
> 
> I was suggesting that a state of peaceful co-existence can be achieved - 
> Our editors will not alter or remove tags that are not ours, and 
> hopefully this will be reciprocated.
> 
Which means- from a mappers perspective- to allways have to use both
editors to make one change on one seamark- very convenient. What a
waste of effort and resources. If not, you end up with a buoy tagged
red in OSeaM and green in FT- which one is right? All this would go
away if OSeaM would render the tags of the wiki proposal as well.

> 
> > and become productive (get nice renderers, get nice editors etc.).
> 
> Nice renderers and editors do not just materialize - they have to be 
> written by the members of the sub-projects. This is the crux of the 
> matter - after having spend considerable time developing those tools, 
> based on a particular set of tag definitions, any later suggestion that 
> we should change them is not going to receive an enthusiastic response!
> 
How can you say that something like a renderer is "finished"- it never
is- look at Mapnik and it ever evolving render rules. Is adding a
couple of rendering rules to the OSeaM renderer really that hard? Sure
it is quite some work in the beginning, but after getting the initial
work done it should be easy to maintain. Burdening every single mapper
out there with this ridiculous duplication of effort is much more work
than adding a couple of rendering rules.

> As far as users are concerned, editors remove the need to manually edit 
> tags, thus no knowledge of the tagging scheme is necessary. As to the 
> question of which scheme to use - choose the editor that will place your 
> work onto the map overlay that you want to see it on.
> 
Unfortunately I want both- OSeaM cannot show most of my safewater
buoys, doesn't render white light beacons etc- for sure nobody is
perfect, so no offence. FT has some other drawbacks (e.g. no proper
Garmin maps). Recommending to choose the editor of the project which
one wants to see their work rendered doesn't cut it. This leads to
something like in the baltic sea where FT data is allmost complete,
OSeaM shows you nothing:

http://www.freietonne.de/seekarte/?zoom=13&lat=54.55132&lon=13.14014&layers=0B0T

http://map.openseamap.org/map/?zoom=14&lat=54.55124&lon=13.13767&layers=B0FTT

What use is OSeaM there? Is simply adding the OSeaM tags to the
existing data the solution? 

I think not- it doesn't make the data that is allready there any
better- it just adds more complexity to the database and makes it
harder to maintain. The mappers will thank you a lot.
> 
> PS: there has been a recent update of the OpenSeaMap JOSM plugin 
> ("toms"). This is now in the OSM repository, so it can be installed 
> using the JOSM Preferences dialogue. The accompanying Mappaint styles 
> will shortly be installable by this method also.
> 
This is much appreciated. 

@ The inner circle of OSeaM: Why not render both tagging schemes and let time decide which
one will be used more?

Hoping for a nice, complete and free seamap...

Cheers, Christian