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 -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
