Hello Frederik,
good and clearly communicated points! I very much appreciate that, and I
agree with the issues you describe. Those are indeed real problems.
However, these fuzzy regions also exist on a small scale, and in my case
it's always been about that. The features I'm mapping now are not the
scale of "The Alps" or even the Black Forest, it's a named wetlands, 1-5
km wide, a single mountain, a slope, a hill, a heath, a small bay or
strait in a lake, etc. These names are everywhere, with more or less
defined borders (often less).
Maybe there should be one system of fuzzy areas to handle both of these
cases, or maybe there should be two, maybe small scale geography could
be in OSM and large scale should be outside. I don't know.
What I do know is that any institutionally made map has these names and
that these are important for outdoor maps, just like names on lakes, and
if we want OSM to be able to provide data for rendering high quality
maps these names must be available somewhere and somehow. I hope that I
don't need to argue that these names do have a place in maps, actually I
think they are quite important for certain types of maps. I understand
that probably outdoor maps is not a priority for most commercial uses of
OSM, so it may not be much money in supporting this. I guess what people
want to know on average is the nearest café in an urban area, not a
guide in a remote national park. So I could also accept that OSM is not
the place for storing geodata for outdoor maps, as long as it's clearly
stated.
It does feel like the normal OSM tagging process isn't really fit for
making progress in this space, as this may require some strategic
decisions implementing and making use of new technical platforms. So the
first thing I'd like to see is that we get a consensus on a goal that we
actually *want* these type of features, and then the exact solution can
be discussed.
As it is now we seem stuck at status quo, and I just see lots of passive
opposition, my ideas of implementation are indeed probably not the
greatest so I understand they get criticism and fairly so, but in the
end I just stand there back at square one with the same problem and no
solution in sight. There are indeed some good efforts to try to solve
this for "The Alps" and similar names large scale names:
https://github.com/dieterdreist/OpenGeographyRegions . Maybe this also
could be used for small scale names I don't know, but these type of
projects have little chance of catching on without coordinated support
from a renderer and "official" OSM wiki docs with usage recommendations
so mappers actually get to use it and contribute and eventually see the
result.
/Anders
On 2020-12-14 12:39, Frederik Ramm wrote:
Hi,
On 14.12.20 12:20, Anders Torger wrote:
My sense is that OSM community do want naming in nature as well, but
only if it can be made very simple. Unfortunately that is not always
compatible with reality, and here we are...
Personally I think naming is desirable for clear features. This
mountain
peak, this protected tree, this lake.
What I don't like in OSM is naming for large geographic areas, like
"the
Alps", "the Black Forest", or "the Bay of Biscay", for two reasons:
First, there can be any number of such areas. Anyone can invent
something. I can speak of the Alps, or the French Alps, or the Northern
French Alps, or the Vanoise Massif, I can group some regions at will
and
make up a new name. These are not administrative boundaries where it is
clear which of them exist "as a region" and and which don't. Of course
everyone knows what I mean when I say "Germany north of Oldenburg" but
that doesn't mean that "Germany north of Oldenburg" is a name that
should be on the map, or a polygon we need in OSM. If I issue a tourist
guide for, say, "Vanoise et Maurienna", does that then make "Vanoise et
Maurienna" a region? How many people need to issue a tourist guide for
this to happen?
Second, these areas are usually ill-defined: There are some places that
are clearly in the Black Forest, and some that are clearly not in the
Black Forest, but there's not one boundary line - there's fuzziness.
OSM
is not good with fuzziness; OSM forces us to have an exact point or
line
or polygon for something. For fuzzy labels, you need a different system
that should exist outside of OSM's current data types. Either by adding
a new fuzzy data type to OSM (no need to assemble 1000 ways with a
total
of 20,000 points to exactly describe the outline of the Alps if all you
want is a nice big lettering in approximately the right spot), or by
keeping these cartography options in a separate system altogether.
Bye
Frederik
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