I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot and I think I’d like some community opinions.
About micromapping and my mapping style
Micromapping is very appealing to me and it’s the style I prefer practicing. Contributing to OSM is one of my main hobbies actually, right now. My current project is micromapping an entire neighbourhood to the highest degree of detail and accuracy that I can manage.
Generally, I’ve always operated on a principle of “the more detailed, accurate and comprehensive the data, the better”. After all, we can all agree that adding a missing business to the map, specifying the surface of a road or mapping individual parking spaces in a car park are objective improvements. Popular projects like StreetComplete likewise focus on the pursuit of maximum ‘completion’ (detail) in their messaging.
The potential issues
However, as of late I’ve been wondering about what happens to the edges of and the transitions to such micromapped areas.
If you take micromapping to its logical conclusion, eventually you’ll arrive at meticulously mapping all streets, roads, paths and junctions as area:highway, every sidewalk as a separate way, every small plaza as highway= with area=yes. You’ll map (the outline, not the private property in) every single backyard. You’ll stick to new and fancy standards like public_transport=platform instead of highway=bus_stop, education= instead of amenity=school and you’re practically the PR agent of the healthcare= key.
And… well, there’s going to be a severe mismatch between ‘your’ areas and the rest of the place. All your roads are suddenly 2D areas, all your sidewalks are separately traced, all your buildings are perfectly catalogued by type. Every tree is mapped where before there was only a lonely landuse=forest area. Perhaps you switched completely to highway=path instead of footway or cycleway for shared walk-and-cycle paths, because it’s semantically more accurate like that.
But what happens if a regular end user now accesses your data in some way? Suddenly, the map style changes for one neighbourhood. Forests look different, and suddenly backyards appear on the map and are green. Roadways, paths and sidewalks suddenly look and act differently.
Initially, my response would have been simple: “well, the better data always wins out, continuously improving the map is the whole point of contributing; and we shouldn’t map around deficiencies in the renderer or the router”. And that’s still correct, I think. An area:highway is objectively more detailed and accurate than a regular one-dimensional highway way. Manually mapped sidewalks provide much better information about the walkability of a location.
But what about the consistency with the rest of the area? Does it really have any value, and if so, when does it win out over accuracy, if ever? The wiki seems to occasionally value consistency, as it does defer to ‘local community practices’ in places.
If my entire local community maps plazas as a grid of imaginary one-dimensional footpaths, then I think I’d do well to replace it with a proper closed highway=pedestrian way with area=yes whenever I spot it, because the existing mapping contradicts the principle of mapping what’s actually on the ground. After the edit, it is going to be represented more accurately.
But then it’s the only plaza in the whole town to be different, unless or until someone decides to do the same to the other plazas throughout the city. Now it might appear in queries as the only plaza in the entire city. Perhaps map applications are going to display it strangely. Maybe it breaks routing with routers which cannot route through areas.
My conclusions
In the end, I think the best way forward is to simply keep pursuing the highest possible accuracy and to largely disregard consistency with historical local practices as a value.
Every improvement ever made has introduced inconsistency compared to non-improved mapping, but it doesn’t mean we should stop improving things.
And even if only a single neighbourhood is mapped with area:highway 2D highways, and the transition to the rest of the road network is jarring; it might simply be a stepping stone toward lifting the surrounding area up into that more detailed, better standard.
Most importantly, the only reason why consistency mismatches might become an issue in the first place is because apps and programs somehow mismanage or inconsistently process data. There’s no reason why a navigation app should give a user a bad experience when the road switches from a one-dimensional way to a 2D area. If I now stopped micromapping for that purpose and instead kept the previous style for consistency, I think that’d be an instance of Mapping for the Renderer or Mapping for the Router.
But I’d still like to hear others’ opinions on the topic, especially since ‘established practices of the local community’ are referenced often enough to make me wonder whether I’m stepping on a lot of people’s feet when I micromap my little neighbourhood area.
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