OpenStreetMap

First Diary: Minor Fruit and Question

Posted by SimpleLuke on 2 September 2014 in English.

I’ve been actively mapping on OSM this summer vacation to complete the map of my hometown. After my effort of 20 changesets in which 2284 ways and 8989 points were contributed, there’s just 5 blocks left blank in the town of Mengjin. I intend to finish them before the new semester starting on 7th. It’s a pity that the export service is always too busy to be available and the new tiles have not been rendered to the map, so I cannot post the map picture here. :-( Here comes my question. It’s about a natural feature which is very common in my area and northwest China. Having read the cliff article in wiki, I don’t think it’s proper to tag the feature as cliff because the same doubt was put forward in the discussion whether a cliff of around 1-3 meters deep as well as not made of rock but earth can be called a cliff. As far as I know, gully is the depression with nearly vertical scarp as a result of water erosion, which quite suits my situation. Luckily I found the gully article in wiki and used it in my work. The place where I used natural=gully. However this tag in not commonly used by others and not rendered as well. I wonder if what I did was appropriate and need help. And same problem for the agricultural terrace. How do I map that cliff of low depth?

Location: 下院沟, Chengguan, Mengjin District, Luoyang, Mengjin, Henan, 471100, China

Discussion

Comment from SK53 on 2 September 2014 at 12:40

Nice work.

For your agricultural terrace I think the most useful tag is barrier=retaining_wall in conjunction with landuse=farmland. It’s really a matter of taste whether you map each terrace separately or not. Given the widespread use of terraces all over the world including these places I’ve recently mapped - Unterengadin, Northern Italy, Lesotho, Nepal, the Philippines - this question should be of wide interest.

There is also the possibility of subtagging (also called adjectival tagging) the farmland, but this has been done 6 times for farmland=terraced. The problem here is that this tag may be in use for describing the purpose of the farmland (e.g., plant nursery), as well as its physical form (e.g., paddy field, terraced): and if more extensively used may actually require more than one tag, for instance for terraced rice paddies.

Comment from Sanderd17 on 2 September 2014 at 13:22

You’re not doing anything wrong with the gully’s (at least not as far as I can see).

It’s just that they don’t appear very often in the West, and since most people taking care for the rendering are from the West …

For those terraces, I agree with SK53. Using a barrier=retaining_wall for every terrace will result in great accuracy, combined with the landuse=farmland.

But if you just want to place big lots of farmland at once (go for the quantity rather than the quality), you can just add a big farmland area on it, and tag it as terraced, as SK53 said.

It’s all a matter of how much time you have, and how you want to use that time. Some want to map a small area until it’s perfect, others prefer to map a bigger area, but with less details, and refine the details over time.

Thanks for the effort ;)

Comment from joost schouppe on 2 September 2014 at 13:28

Nice! To get the rendering of your new work visible, it helps to refresh (shift+f5) the map view at zoom levels which are a bit out of date.

Comment from SimpleLuke on 2 September 2014 at 14:19

Thank you all for all your helpful advice and kind tips, as well as the warmth of the OSM community!

Comment from 4rch on 2 September 2014 at 18:21

Wow, nice work! We need more mapper like you in China! ;) But please be careful: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/China#Legality

Comment from 4rch on 2 September 2014 at 18:31

rendering should work fast on high zoom levels. Press “F5” on the browser page to refresh your cache.

Comment from SimpleLuke on 3 September 2014 at 05:23

Hi 4rch, thanks for your kind reminder of legal risk I was taking. As the wiki says, the gov presumably will not hassle us. I was a little worried before and have read the related law. I think editing maps based on satellite imagery is not so dangerous as those reported to have been fined a lot of money. Perhaps I will never upload a GPS trace, for using WGS 84 coordinate in survey is illegal in China. Also, as you can see I draw nothing in the military zone. These are what I do to avoid jeopardizing the state security. It’s likely that I will continue to edit streets and POIs for navigation purposes rather than such a detailed map of town, for I’m not familiar with other places as detailed as my hometown. Maybe I will also call for other students in railway fans club to join the complement of China Railways Project, which has been stopped for years.:)

Comment from 4rch on 3 September 2014 at 15:44

Ok, good, I thought mentioning the legal situation would be good. Personally I can’t tell you more about the law as chinese law doesn’t apply to me because I live in Germany.

The China Railway wikipage wasn’t updated since 2012. I think there are much more railway lines in the OSM database than mentioned in the Wiki.

Here you can find a map which is specialized on railways (based on OSM data): http://www.openrailwaymap.org/

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