On Monday 13 January 2020, Frederik Ramm wrote: > > According to Wikipedia, the International Hydrographic Organization > defines the eastern boundary of the Río de la Plata as "a line > joining Punta del Este, Uruguay and Cabo San Antonio, Argentina", > which is what has been the case in OSM until now:
That is a straw man argument that has been floated already at the very beginning when a riverbank polygon was first created for that (which was later than when the Río de la Plata was originally mapped by the way - just to clarify that). The IHO specifies an (obviously subjective and non-verifiable) set of limits of *oceans and seas*. If anyone wants to use this as an argument that would make the Río de la Plata a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean and therefore to be placed outside the coastline. So using the IHO as a source (in lieu of the verifiable geography in a Wikipedia-like fashion so to speak) kind of defeats the basic argument for the Río de la Plata to not be a maritime waterbody. > This current representation in OSM leads to a few strange situations > especially in toolchains/map styles that use different colours for > inland water and oceans, or that draw sea depths, or just highlight > the coastline. Buenos Aires, according to OSM, is currently not a > coastal city. The main reason why the current mapping is vigorously maintained by some local mappers is political in nature. Argentina and Uruguay want to claim this area as internal waters (and the administrative boundaries are mapped accordingly) but not every other nation accepts this claim. Presenting the Río de la Plata as a non-maritime waterbody in as many maps and data sets as possible would support such claim. My own solution as a data user to this has been to simply maintain a coastline cheatfile which marks this as a special case and moves the Río de la Plata polygon into the ocean polygon data. This is unfortunate but way simpler than trying to fight against a widespread politically motivated conviction. See also: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:maritime=yes > I'm not so clear about how to interpret the wiki page myself when it > comes to river mouths. There's a clarifying proposal here > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_Features/Coastline-River >_transit_placement but this is still at the proposal stage. The IMO logical approach to placing the closing segment of the coastline at a river mouth according to the spirit of the OpenStreetMap project is to place it where for the verifiable view of humans the maritime domain ends and the riverine domain starts. This is largely an ecological question. Coastline and riverbanks are physical geography features so their position is to be defined by physically observable characteristics rather than politically defined limits. Like so often (for example in case of the line between scrubland and woodland) this is often not a clearly visible sharp line but a transit. There are however clearly observable limits to the extent of this transit. The proposal cited tries to specify those. Back when i drafted the proposal there was very little interest in the subject except by those who were opposed to it for political reasons. Therefore i did not pursue it further. But anyone is welcome to take it up again. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
