OpenStreetMap logo OpenStreetMap

Canadian coast - followup

Posted by DENelson83 on 7 March 2022 in English.

After just under five months of hard work, I have completed my project of giving every single body of seawater in Canada an area definition. I have experienced some pushback from other editors who had issues with this project, including my practice of only giving one point of seawater a single name, as well as questioned whether area definitions were even necessary and saying that point definitions would have sufficed, as well as how I was defining their extents. However, mapmaking is as much an art as it is a science, and my own preference is for area definitions over point definitions in this case. As well, my “one point, one name” rule had one intent and one positive effect: The intent was to minimize interference with coastline edits, and the positive effect was that I was able to minimize as much as I could the number of ways in each relation, not just for bodies of seawater in a sort of “divide and conquer” strategy, but also for islands as well as for the mainland coastline of Canada. Sure, there were some outliers with thousands of ways, such as the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Labrador Sea, but there are very few of those, and I would estimate the average number of ways in each relation over this whole dataset is only about a few hundred.

Email icon Bluesky Icon Facebook Icon LinkedIn Icon Mastodon Icon Telegram Icon X Icon

Discussion

Comment from SomeoneElse on 7 March 2022 at 13:02

Hello,

I would strongly recommend that you do not put too much effort into this project as your responses at https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/83528/can-different-named-areas-of-sea-overlap suggest that you’re ignoring the way that most other mappers in OSM map things.

If that’s the case, and your changes do not reflect realiy, it’s likely that we (OSM’s Data Working Group) will need to revert some of these changes.

In the real world it’s simply not true that every one piece of sea has “only one name”, just like it’s not true that any one piece of ground has. For example, I live in a city with a name, but that is also in England, and also in the United Kingdom. It can get more complicated of course - see e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20190225133138/http://ma3t.co.uk/euanmills/euanmills/tifd.html and http://mappinglondon.co.uk/2013/londons-localities/ .

Best Regards,

Andy Townsend, on behalf of OSM’s Data Working Group

Comment from H@mlet on 7 March 2022 at 19:57

@SomeoneElse thanks for saying more or less what I was thinking, with much more diplomacy than I feel capable.

Regards.

Comment from DENelson83 on 7 March 2022 at 20:18

I agree that one spot on dry ground can have more than one name, like Vancouver in Metro Vancouver Regional District in British Columbia. The same is the case for bodies of freshwater, completely surrounded by land, such as Lake Huron and its component known as Georgian Bay. But with seawater, it is not as clear-cut, and this same kind of relationship is very much open to interpretation.

Log in to leave a comment