Sorry for perhaps adding further complexity, but if you haven't noted, one thing that crawls under the surface when it comes to names in nature is this "holy" principle:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Verifiability

Names of natural features often don't have strict borders. Wetlands as in this example is typically quite defined, but there are cases also in Muddus when the wetland is so large that it has one name in one end and another name in the other. So I have to split the wetland at some point I find "suitable". That is not verifiable, there's never been a defined border, and another mapper could choose a slightly different split line. I don't see it as a big issue, as long as renderers don't render and outline these borders, but I can "read between the lines" that some on this list do.

However fuzzy borders like this is not some narrow special case. Names in nature is very often this way, and many names have survived from times when the civilization weren't even much bothered by such borders at all. In lakes and sea we have a lot of these too of course, and there the fuzzy areas bay and strait actually do exist and serves the cartography well, but not without protests... I've seen desire to have these removed completely.

I think OSM should either strive support nature naming as it works in reality (and document how to tag), or make a clear statement that names of this type should not exist in the database. I think the latter would be sad, but at the same time I find it extremely frustrating to get what I experience as "passive opposition" when I bring up these kind of needs.

A clear statement would be nicer. On the verifiability page above there actually are is an example of fuzzy areas and that those can be accepted (hamlet used as an example). Nature naming is not discussed though.

/Anders

On 2020-12-14 10:41, Anders Torger wrote:

For reference, here's Rijmmoáhpe again, a wetland which is about 4 km across, consisting of both bog and marsh:

https://www.torger.se/anders/downloads/Screenshot_2020-12-13-OpenStreetMap.png

It's located in Muddus national park, Sweden.

I'm quite sure the recommendation Christoph refers to is simply to put names on each separate part, which is seen in the screenshot. It's unclear to me if this is seen by Christoph and others as a final and good solution, or just as "the best we can do for the moment". So I hope to get a clarification on that.

Personally I see it as "the best we can do for the moment", but think that it of course should be rendered as a single name, and as such the name tag should not really be on each separate part, but on a relation. Sure a renderer could trace around and scan for neighboring areas with the same name and automatically, calculate the area of each part to find out the dominant nature type (required for name tag styling), and place a single name, but to me it does not seem like a proper way to arrange geo data for a single named natural entity.

So what I have done in addition is to create a relation with type=natural; natural=wetland; name=Rijmmoáhpe with all the parts as members (role field unset). If that is just too controversial, I can skip that and leave with just naming the parts. I planned to do that at first, but as some of these natural features are quite heavily fragmented in small pieces just for a management point of view in JOSM I found this relation to be practical thing to have, so I added it.

There's a whole family of unanswered questions regarding to names of nature. If Martin's fuzzy area concept was accepted and used https://github.com/dieterdreist/OpenGeographyRegions maybe many of these features would use that instead. Or maybe if place=locality concept on points was developed and diversified that could be used instead. I don't have any strong opinions on which method to use, I just want to be able to map with high detail and high quality and use any method that works.

On 2020-12-14 10:05, Ture Pålsson via Tagging wrote:

13 dec. 2020 kl. 16:15 skrev Christoph Hormann <o...@imagico.de>:
I am trying to understand what the issue is with the recommendation for mapping you have received from multiple sides here. Just to clarify, could you summarise what that recommendation is, for the Rijmmoáhpe case? The thread has become a little unwieldy (partially my fault... sorry about that!).

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