On Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 7:55 AM Christoph Hormann <o...@imagico.de> wrote: > As a rule of thumb i'd say something that can at least coarsely be > surveyed on the ground by a single mapper during a single day is > usually suitable to be mapped as a distinct named feature, provided it > is otherwise verifiable of course. For larger things mapping should > focus on locally mapping locally surveyable constituent parts or > aspects of the feature but i would be very careful with creating > features for them as a whole because this very often drifts from the > OSM idea of mapping local knowledge to a Wikipedia-like recording of > social conventions.
I doubt very much that you're saying what you intended here. It comes across as saying, for instance, that lakes too big to map on the ground in a single day should not be mapped, or should not be named. I think that making large waterbodies disappear would be ridiculous. Moreover, if you've mapped something on the ground, what difference does it make how long it took? It took me a number of trips over many days to gather the GPS tracks that were consolidated into https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/4286650. (It was initially planned as a single trip with two stops for resupply, but the best laid plans gang aft agley.) On one of those trips I was in the field for six days straight, and was at times thirty km from the nearest drivable road. Of course the relation has many constituent ways, because of tagging for things like bridge=yes or ford=yes, changes of surface=*, brief stretches where the trail follows a road, and similar changes. Moreover, I intentionally broke the ways up so as not to have thousands of nodes on any signle way. But on the ground, the relation represents a single trail. It has the same name for its entire length (and is signed where it shares the way with a highway). Is it less worthy of mapping because in order to order to map one section, I had to lug enough batteries to keep my GPS going (and enough food to keep Kevin going) for six days? Surely you're not arguing that I can't have 'local knowledge' of it when I've personally had my literal boots on the literal ground for every step of the way? I understand that there are fairly severe technological issues at present, where a plethora of enormous multipolygons breaks some of the software tools. For now, therefore, I refrain from mapping anything like the Long Island Sound or the Red Sea as areas, even though I believe that competent label placement in some renderings will require that eventually. Similarly, I'm not about to go mapping enormous linear features or area features for the Mogollon Plateau, the Catskill Mountains, or the Great Dismal Swamp, The software will catch up in time, and in the meantime I'll try to be a good neighbour and not break things; I can experiment on my own database with my own toolchain. But some large features are unavoidable: I'm not giving up Lake Champlain or the Adirondack Park just because of their immense size. I understand that relations with a vast number of members are also problematic, which is why I introduced a further level of breakdown into sections on the not-quite-finished project to map https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/919642 . I try to be a good citizen with large objects, but there are large definite objects in the field, and a rule like "no bigger than a day's walk" is going to leave us with an urban-only map. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
