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I m just wondering what tags to use for some items, it might be a Dutch problem but also for other countries, like Belgium and France and even Germany. Which tag for water systems like, ditch, canal or moat and little streams like brook or brooklet. And which tag for onderground waterways like a syphon stream under another waterway ? I also miss a tag for a culvert or a concrete man map connection between 2 waterways ? I d like to turn a name of a waterway in the direction of the waterway, is that possible and how ? I m used to turn names for objects or streams to below or right side of the drawing. Why does the system make the definition lake for any water, stream or canal ?

asked 23 Apr '12, 16:05

Hendrikklaas's gravatar image

Hendrikklaas
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There is a tag "drain" with physical detail of "tunnel"

(23 Apr '12, 16:57) andy mackey

The wiki Map Features page, which is the first place to look for commonly used tags, has a waterway section.

This includes canal, river, stream, drain and ditch.

Lakes, ponds and other closed bodies of water use natural=water (even if it is man made).

Larger rivers can have their banks drawn to create a wider body of water using the riverbank tag.

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answered 23 Apr '12, 17:17

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ChrisH
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accept rate: 15%

There are two questions here:

  1. How do I map water features?
  2. How do I make the water features that I've mapped look nice on the map?

With regard to (1), English simply doesn't have the huge range of words for canal features that exist in Dutch (not in common use, anyway). The waterway section of the map features page that ChrisH pointed to is an excellent place to start, but it might be worth asking around in the NL community to see if there are any standards in use there for mapping the extra detail.

With regard to (2), it's worth bearing in mind that the standard maps are just examples of how the data can be represented. There's no explicit information that says "this label goes here" - the rendered (in the case of the "standard" map a stylesheet for the Mapnik library) figures out where best to fit text on the fly. If you were designing a map to be printed out for publication, you'd probably take more care of it and manually arrange labels, but that's information you'd add at the "map creation" stage, not at "data entry".

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answered 23 Apr '12, 22:52

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SomeoneElse ♦
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question asked: 23 Apr '12, 16:05

question was seen: 3,888 times

last updated: 23 Apr '12, 22:52

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum