The RU:Key:wood proposal seems reasonable (though in practice things like “start date” are normally only known to the people logging the area to begin with, and things like forest age can be difficult to know). It would be nice if it could be translated to English.

We don’t neglect to add difficult mountain-biking routes just because not everyone is a good mountain biker.

In fact, I strongly suspect that neglecting to put faint trails on maps may cause people to misread their maps when they come upon these trails. As Sanderd17 said, just tag appropriately (I think trail_visibility is the most relevant here).

I think deleting a defined path is a bad idea because someone might go map it again without realizing why it was removed. If there is a trail that is closed, and it’s not really a place that anyone should or would go regardless of their technical skill, removing the “highway” key, or changing it to “disused:highway” seems better to me, and then future mappers will be able to see why it’s not displayed on the map.

It’s a little unfortunate that openstreetmap.org doesn’t care about the value of SAC scale when rendering paths.

It seems to have been recreated: osm.org/changeset/34336415

Some offer places to sit, and in any case, you’re supposed to consume it rather quickly (unlike typical shops where you take the goods home before using them).

It is not at all uncommon for a place in Canada to offer take-home products as well as ones to consume immediately.

Mountain regions are filled with landslides and very small seasonal streams. It’s very difficult to differentiate between them. What is the correct way to map them?

It’s hard to tell unless you’ve been there, and even there’s no clear rules. If creek-bed is dry during the summer, I will usually go with natural=scree for the creek-bed and waterway=stream & intermittent=yes for the line where the water would go.

I usually don’t map streams unless I’ve:

• been there myself
• the presence of water is quite visible on from imagery (in which case, it might be a river)
• or I have some other supporting evidence (i.e. the stream exists in government maps)

There’s a fair bit that is difficult to tell from satellite imagery. How intermittent it is is the main one, as you mentioned. It’s also possible that the stream might go under a boulder field, and be essentially “underground”.

In the Himalayas, you often have lots of loose soil, which results in very distinct angles in the landscape, which makes it easy to see where the water would go. In many places, the valley bottoms are a lot harder to see.

As far as I know, there’s no good tag for a canoe launch.

+1

The wood/forest and path/foot path distinction were pretty arbitrary. I am glad to see them go. I like the new colors/icons as well.

I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t have duplicate key-value pairs in the current api; however, I think it’s disallowed because of limitations elsewhere. Also, this would violate current expectations that other tools have (for example, the rendering of a road shows the name of the road along side of it, but if there are two names, which name does it pick?)

On the other landuses such as grass parks and forests, they can have textures added like the forest currently has.

While this may work for the forest “landuse” (I’m not even sure what that means), natural=wood would have to be changed too.

The further problem with green roads, apart from their shear distinguish ability, is that they fail at being iconic (in a semiotic sense). In other words, the other green things on the map are all generally indicators of some level of plant life, or protection of such life, and highway=trunk has nothing to do with plant life. A green highway=trunk works fine in places that have largely been deforested (i.e. Western Europe, big cities), but not well in many other places.

For UK use, it’s vital that the style distinguishes between highway=trunk and highway=motorway, as the two roads have different rules and restrictions.

I think more practically, it may be useful to just have a separate map rendering for UK users (much like openstreetmap.de for German users).

Nice job. Looks like only a few US states are rendered right now. Would be interested in seeing Washington too.

as otherwise what’s the point of putting something in the database if it’s not going to show on the map

Well you can still find it when searching for it.

I think the main concern though is not “Whether we should show all the data” but “At what zoom level should we start showing data and how prominent should it be”?

For what it’s worth, except for the terrible tree coloured highways, openstreetmap-carto is great for mountainous areas, for example: http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#14/48.7743/-121.8236&num=2&mt0=mapnik&mt1=google-map

I think data-density shouldn’t be a great problem for roads if you just make the smaller ones less visible, since in cities, most of the roads tend to be residential/service roads, where as in a rural area most of the roads have a more significant classification.

Unfortunately, the above breaks down for non-motorized “highways”. There is currently no good way to designate if a highway=path is a major-trail/walkway, or if it just a small off-shoot.

I just took a quick look at the vicinity, and all the rivers I saw were in valleys (based on OpenCycleMaps SRTM data). I probably missed some though, so it’s best to share a link to your example.

It’s pretty easy when looking at topographical lines, to get oriented upside down though, so that may have been your problem..

the question i have is can governments use OSM data, then make it classified.

I am not a lawyer, but it seems to my that while you you could sue the government for copyright infringement, you probably won’t get the remedy you’re looking for (government opening up data) based on some sort of vague “not in the public interest” or “issue of national security” reason.

Probably just a polygon with the tag sport=swimming where the actual swimming takes place (i.e. in the water).

If it’s a road to a park then I think at least highway=unclassified would be normal.

In British Columbia, many of our roads (regardless of their use) go through forests, because there are forests all over the place.

Obviously the best solution would be for your to burn down all the forests around Moscow.

At the risk of derailing this important issue, I would like to mention that I think this problem is a lot more pertinent to OSM than current coffee prices.

To some degree, this sort of linking has already be done with a lot of imported data. For example, the tiger:tlid tag. Of course these tags are specific to their imports. I see two problems with this approach:

• First, it requires users to copy the tags when recreating objects. A lazy or ignorant user probably won’t. I think expecting users to do this is going to create a lot of headaches when some invariably don’t.

• Second, this requires the mapper to decide when the identity of an object changes. For, example, if there is a McDonalds, and it moves into a building across the road, is it still the same McDonalds? What if the building is on the other side of town? What if two campsites are merged, who’s id is used then? On OMS, a road often gets broken into segments because there is a bridge, or the speed limit changes, do these segments get the same id? In real life, there are often unconnected roads with the same name that were historically the same road, do these get the same id?

One fuzzy solution that will probably work reasonably well for your use case is to match campsites based on the location of the campsite (or an average of the nodes in its polygons). If that value changes significantly, you probably want to to consider it a separate camp site anyway.