Josh & others, I think we need to take a break here from making OSM into a map of large-scale geographic features.
This is getting out of hand. I vividly remember the endless discussions about bays and peninsulae. Drainage basins. Now plateaus. I don't remember mountain ranges in the recent past but if they weren't discussed then they surely are next. The way OSM usually works is someone stumbles over something in reality, with a discernible name or property, and adds it to OSM. We are, first and foremost, surveyors. The larger a feature becomes, the less suitable OSM is for mapping it. And in the case of the several large-scale objects I have mentioned, most contributors don't even have surveying in mind, but just writing down existing conventions. I haven't checked, but I would be very surprised if *anyone* actually used the natural=peninsula tag for something they happen to identify as a peninsula - no, natural=peninsula is just a method of putting existing geographical names into OSM (because the fact that something is a peninsula can be auto-detected). Same with your plateaus and tablelands now - do you really envisage someone looking at the landscape around them and saying "why, there's a hard layer of rock here on top of softer layers, and a couple cliffs at the sides, I guess I'll map this as a plateau"? No, again this is a situation where you have third-party information about a plateau (and likely its name) and are looking for ways to get that into OSM. All these requests are born from a desire to write down existing large-scale geological/geographical knowledge. But OSM is ill suited for that; OSM cannot accommodate imprecise features. If you want to map a mesa well in OSM then it has to be detectable on the ground, and it has to have a clearly delineated boundary. What you are trying to do here is adding large-scale features that come in handy when you want to make a map ata 1:10m or maybe 1:50m scale. Projects like naturalearthdata.com are ideally suited for that kind of data. OpenStreetMap is not. I think we all should stop seeking out one large-scale feature type after the other that is "missing" from OSM and think about how to best add them. In my view, the fact that these are underrepresented in OSM is not an opportunity to "improve" OSM but a sign that OSM isn't the right place for that kind of data. Instead, let us find a way of recording such imprecise information outside of OSM's data model, and make it easy to access it e.g. when rendering maps. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
