On 29/10/2014, Richard Z. <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 05:21:06PM +0100, moltonel 3x Combo wrote: >> On 28/10/2014, Richard Z. <[email protected]> wrote: > well even if the issues were nonexistent, mapping the area of a bay seems > to me like mapping an artificially introduced concept for which there is > very little real world use or recognition otherwise.
Huh ? Forget about maps and osm for a moment. A bay is "a body of water mostly surrounded by land". You're "in" a bay, not "at" a bay. It has a size, it's not a point in space with a buoy marking the spot. It's an area. The fact that a lot of sources have simplified it down to a point is an entirely different issue. But there's no reason that, with modern tools and manpower, we can't make a better job than those historical sources. And remember that when you see a rendered bay label, you don't actually know wether the source (wether it's some vector data or an idea in the sailor's brain) was an area or a point to begin with. > Also bays with very > flat or deep geometry will result in disproportionately small areas so > mappers may feel compelled to do some ugly workarounds if the name of the > bay isn't shown as expected. Disproportionate compared to what ? And fairly flat coastlines are a good example of cases that are tricky for algorythms, where the human mapper can probably make a better decision. > So I would say > * if there is some other reason valid to map the bay as area, do it pros: - bays are areas in real life - it makes geocoding trivial - it makes knowing which bays to render preferably easy (bigger bays first) - it enables representing nested bays - it is deterministic, as opposed to relying on a heuristic algorythm cons: - relations are harder to work with than nodes - the extent of bays is usually fuzzy; nodes make that fuzzyness obvious - most of the existing data (osm and potential imports) are nodes YMMV, those are reasons enough for me. > * something better needs to be invented for hinting the renderer. It's not just the renderer, I actually think that the geocoding usacase is more important. And geocoding requires an area, wether it is provided in readily-usable form as osm data, or by a heuristics-based algorythm that infers it from a node. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
