Either seas should be mapped as areas, or should bays and straits should not be mapped as areas. Which is the best option?
Right now, mappers are changing seas to bays and mapping as large multipolygons to get them to render. In the past year the number of natural=bay relations has increased from 2,000 to almost 5,000, while the number of nodes only increased from 45k to 46k. Relations tagged natural=strait increased from 290 in March 2018 to 945 today. This happened after bays and straits mapped as polygons were rendered at low zoom levels in the Openstreetmap-Carto style. The rendering change also encouraged mappers to use natural=bay for very large features that are called a "gulf" or "bay" even though they are larger than the average "sea". The wiki page for place=sea has said this since 2011: "A large body of marine water and part of an ocean: seas, gulfs, bights and very large bays such as the Bay of Biscay." Yet the Bay of Biscay is now mapped as a multipolygon tagged natural=bay (likely so that it will be rendered at low zoom levels). The original wiki page for place=sea only recommended using a node. Another users added a suggestion to map with a multipolygon, but the list of acceptable objects was not changed to include "area" until January 2018. At that time, there were over 120 place=sea mapped as nodes and less than 20 mapped as relations (see https://taghistory.raifer.tech). Now there are 68 place=sea nodes and 63 place=sea relations. Clearly, a few mappers have spent a good deal of time changing bay, strait and sea nodes to multipolygons in the past several months. I am thinking of changing the place=sea wiki page back to the earlier version that only recommended mapping as nodes, because I cannot download and manage these new huge relations. Also see: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/3750 However, perhaps others disagree? I also think that if seas should be mapped, large bays should also be mapped as nodes rather than large multipolygons. (Straits and narrow bays like fjords can also be mapped as linear ways) _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
