Re: [Talk-GB] Marking landuse and field boundaries

[Chris Hill]

On 01/01/13 16:57, Tom Chance wrote: On 1 January 2013 16:10, Chris Hill <o...@raggedred.net> wrote: On 01/01/13 11:15, Dudley Ibbett wrote: I must admit I don't map land use if it is farmland.  To me if it isn't mapped it is farmland.  It would seem a reasonable default. +1 Smothering the countryside with landuse when it's farmland seems well over the top to me. Marking a single field surrounded by urban or a village setting seems a good idea, but just making everything in the countryside that isn't woods, water, scrub, wetland, etc etc as farmland or fields seems distracting. I must disagree. Leaving an area unmapped leaves its nature completely unknown. You might as well say unmapped land in cities must be residential land so leave it unmapped, yet we map it because it is useful. Hardly. Cities cover a tiny proportion of the land of Britain, so mapping the landuse in detail in cities makes sense.   It may seem obvious to somebody looking at a web map, panning around an area they know to be complete. But that isn't the only use of OpenStreetMap data, and we have no way of knowing whether an area is in fact complete. Hmmm.  So we should just fill the space to say "It's done"?  Adding the (valuable) field boundaries shows the area has been touched and the actual area of the fields are effectively shown without adding the (IMHO) rather pointless field polygons. I have been making maps of "natural" spaces in London, and it is nice to show farmland (even if much of it is of dubious natural value). Should I be forced to compute the gaps in land cover, ignore strips between land uses and work out for myself where the farmland is, assuming that any area unmapped fits the description? As I said above (you must have missed it) marking fields within urban areas is a good idea as you been doing. The contrast with the surroundings is valuable and is not smothering thousands of square kilometres with pointless polygons that add no value. Mapping it as farmland needn't distract anybody - it can remain unrendered, for example. If fields did not get rendered then they would not show up as a contrast in a urban areas and I'm not being led by the way stuff renders - I have many different renders of my own, and some specifically show fields, others do not. People will do as they please of course, I just think it's over the top. -- Cheers, Chris user: chillly

_______________________________________________
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb