On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 10:50 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer < dieterdre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> the question should be: how to map a mountain range, as it seems we can't > represent these kind of features (very big, blurry borders, not mappable in > high zoom levels) well in our data model. That's the main reason why we > don't have these. There are also other features similar to a mountain range > (a "forest" as name for a region, including non-forest areas, lowlands / > plains, desert, ...). Actually we don't have tags or a way to map to most > of these geographic > > features and regions besides the atomic components (like peaks). > Thanks, I was having trouble articulating what the issue is. Tags like landuse=* or natural=* often work well for mapping a physical property with a sharp border - but not so well when we're describing a human abstraction (a "mountain range" is really an abstraction over a number of individual mountains, and it's up to some sort of geologists' consensus where it begins and ends). > IMHO it would be nice to have an alternative dataset in lower zoomlevels > for geographic regions and extended/blurry features, something like a set > of shapefiles with translations into all languages we can provide, > something similar to what natural earth data provides, but distributed and > modified/translated by us, not just English and for higher zoom levels > (i.e. more detailed) than what NE has. Still we could start with their > geographic regions dataset and refine it, as "All versions of *Natural > Earth* raster + vector map data found on this website are in the public > domain." > > Are you saying that this kind of data is a poor fit for OSM itself? > if you don't know what it is (i.e. "generic feature") place=locality seems > perfectly fitting, otherwise be more precise and tag or subtag it as what > it is (e.g. a cluster of rocks). > > My issue with place=locality is that the place=* are basically for human habitation, whereas these can occur in completely uninhabited places. As a cartographer, I'd want to label these using topographic styling (ie, similar to how I'd show natural=peak, natural=saddle), and not at all similar to place=hamlet Hence my desire for something like natural=feature - a catch-all, label any "natural" feature. Steve
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