On Mon, 14 Dec 2020 at 21:41, Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote:
> > What I don't like in OSM is naming for large geographic areas, Thanks for the explanation, Frederik, but I'd like to make a couple of points like "the Alps", "the Black Forest", or "the Bay of Biscay", for two > reasons: > > First, there can be any number of such areas. Why is that a problem? Are you concerned that somebody may mistake the Black Forest in Southern Germany with the (hypothetical!) Black Forests in the US & Australia? Or that different people may map it in different spots? If you've mapped the Black Forest roughly north-south, then I map something E-W in the same area & also call it the Black Forest, somebody is going to notice & ask me why? & if I can't come up with a good explanation, it's going to be reverted. 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. So? If I look at a map eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Forest#/media/File:Relief_Map_of_Germany,_Black_Forest.png, it tells me that the Balck Forest is a more or less oval-shaped area in Southern Germany. Why can't we draw a similar rough oval in OSM & call it Black Forest? If someone then extends it so that Stuttgart or Zurich are included, once again, it will be spotted & corrected. We name towns & cities all the time, with a nice, neat line saying that this area is part of this town, & outside this line isn't. But what about that house 300 m down the road - is it part of the town or not? OSM is not good with fuzziness; OSM forces us to have an exact point or > line or polygon for something. I would have said that everything in the natural world is "fuzzy", indeed, everything that's not an exact geometric man-made object eg a building or fence, will almost certainly be? I know that I've mapped woodland areas previously & the boundary doesn't run along the exact edge of the treeline - yes, most of the trees are inside the line, with only a "few" outside it, but how could it be done any better? I could very carefully go along with a million points, twisting & turning to get every tree, but then next week, one of them falls down, so it's then got to be corrected! For fuzzy labels, you need a different system that should exist outside of > OSM's current data types. Does it have to be outside? 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), & that's (I think) exactly what Anders wants, & I'll go along with him! It doesn't have to be "exact", just so long as somebody can look at the map & say that that area there is the "Whatever"! Thanks Graeme
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