On 13/01/2008, 80n <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jan 12, 2008 2:10 PM, Martijn van Oosterhout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Let's say I'm looking at a satellite image and I see a body of water. > > Is it a lake/reservoir/dam/blah? I don't know. Yet the proposed scheme > > forces me to choose one with a 2/3 chance of being wrong. Maybe its a > > type that has no translation in English, then I'm really SOL. > > > > I suppose what I'm contesting is the statement that natural=water is > > deprecated. It covers all the impoartant properties needed for 99% of > > users. If somebody cares about details they can add them but I object > > to me being forced to care. > > > > I totally agree with this sentiment. > > It should be possible to be vague about something when tagging it. There > are several vague tags that I really like and use frequently (natural=water, > natural=grass being my two favorites) that allow you to describe what you > see without having to worry about whether it's a lake a pond or a reservoir, > or a park a green or a common. In many cases there's no way of knowing or > finding out, so these vague tags are very useful.
well, yes and no. if you want to be vague, there's no reason why we can't have a waterway=water tag. that way if the mapper doesn't know what *exact* type of water it is, they can still tag it under the water scheme, but not have to know anymore. at present, if they don't know what type of water it is, they have to tag it under a separate hierarchical tree, using a tag (natural) which overlaps with the water tag. the point i'm trying to get across, is that all water features, be they linear (rivers, canals, stream) or areas (lakes, reservoirs) or whatever would benefit from being under _one_ top-level tag, for consistency. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
