On Sun, Apr 28, 2019 at 3:24 PM Colin Smale <colin.sm...@xs4all.nl> wrote: > How about taking the maritime baseline (according to UNCLOS) as the location > of the rivermouth? Then it becomes both credible and verifiable, as the > baselines are deposited at the UN for the purposes of determining the limits > of territorial waters.
The hard-liners would, if I am not misinformed, argue that the UNCLOS maritime baseline is not verifiable, since it cannot be ascertained by direct observation in the field. It's not obvious that it's what we'd want to follow in any case - it doesn't make sense to me to say that Connecticut has no 'coastline', yet the Long Island Sound is a 'juridical bay' and the US 'coastline' follows the south shore of Long Island only. > Don't we already (grudgingly) allow polygons to indicate maritime areas with > fuzzy boundaries, such as bays and straits? Why should that be tolerated > while the same concept on land is frowned upon? The same hard-liners have argued specifically that the practice you mention is not allowed and has never been allowed, and that all such features that are in OSM are in OSM in contravention of clearly established policy. The example that I gave of the Red Sea, for instance, cannot have a (multi)polygon because of the uncertainty about the boundary between it and the Gulf of Aden. While the fire rages, I've refrained from mapping any such feature, even though I would very much like to have them in the database so as to be able to label the features on large-scale paper maps that show only a portion of the larger areas, not including any point features near their (necessarily approximate) centroids. Without having areas in the database, it's surely unclear how to go about labeling incomplete features. Having a separate data store to maintain the 'forbidden' multipolygon relations is fraught, owing to the fact that for similar reasons, anything in OSM resembling a 'foreign key' and allowing OSM objects to be associated with an external database is also strongly deprecated. (Wikidata references appear to be tolerated, but the hard-liners are against them as well.) By 'hard-liner' I do not mean disparagement. (I disagree with them, but try to respect them.) In fact, I mean 'hard-liner' in two senses: holding a hard line on the admission of indefinite features, and demanding that area features be bounded with hard lines. One phrase does double duty here. Everyone appears to tolerate the presence of feature names in OSM. It is unclear whether any of the hard-liners would argue that a natural=peak, for instance, ought to have its name omitted if there is no sign giving it. 'Look the name up on an existing (license-compatible) map,' is clearly an unacceptable practice in the hard-line world, but it's not clear whether 'ask a few locals what the name is' would be depending on unverifiable external information, since it's not the mapper's personal local knowledge, and it's even more unclear how personal local knowledge of the name of a feature could ever be acquired other than by transmission of someone else's knowledge. How do you learn the name of something without someone telling you? The only exception would be if the mapper were the person who named it, and I think there's a broad consensus that we don't want mappers naming things arbitrarily! Most of us would call that 'vandalism.' _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
