Looking for the Pacific Ocean

Was curious since the Americana map shows North Pacific and South Pacific and followed your link to the CS which says "removing name= from oceans as per wiki page* " by a mapper who likes to hop the planet. The OSM relation is for some reason linked to the wikipedia in the :eo language, which is, so it says, not an official language. The wiki sphere shows indeed just the N/S names, no central name although the wiki IS headed Pacific Ocean in eo and en. Doubtlessly v74 will be coming in the not too distant future of the OSM relation.

Actually, I still do see North Pacific and South Pacific in OSM Americana. The docs suggests that that is coming from OMT and then Natural Earth (at low zooms) or OpenStreetMapData (higher), but the OMT documentation is a little vague about what the ultimate source is (experience would suggest OSM nodes rather than relations, but it’d be nice to see the code).

“eo” is Esperanto. OSM oceans were afflicted for a while by a pest that insisted on using Esperanto for “international” names. See also here. Their logic was that English shouldn’t have a “special place” in OSM as it was just one language among many, and depending on how you count it may not be the most spoken. However, English does have a special place in “the language of the sea”, mainly for historical reasons.

I used Esperanto in my example as a bit of a joke because of that.

3 Likes
  1. Actually, OSM Carto is far from majority use of OSM data I have seen

  2. If someone is using free OSMF tile servers it does not mean that they have rights to dictate how map style is designed and we have no obligation to follow their demands

@jidanni I think that I would put more effort into working on getting some of your ideas done rather than making endless parades of feature requests.
Or at least make a bit more higher quality feature requests.
It is better to make one feature request in a correct place, that was not requested before and has not get rejected already than 200 failing this.
Actually it is better to not make feature request than to create duplicate or one in a wrong place or one that is clearly getting rejected.

5 Likes

Yes, these two labels come from other nodes that have not had their name=* tags removed like the Pacific node has. name=* has also been removed from the Atlantic Ocean node, apparently “following instructions” from the wiki. Guess who added these instructions 


5 Likes

Just tell them Trump has discontinued it.

After all, we’ve always been at war with Oceania, and Euroasia were always our allies! Wait, or was it other way around this month?

Maybe 2025 will be year of vector map on OSM.org (which at least might have to ability to solve that political / language problem).

Until then, as noted many times before, OSM is not a map, so neither you nor your parents should depend on it as such.

There admittedly exist several visual debug interface aids to quickly inspect certain aspects of geospatial database consistency (listed under that Layers button on right-hand side of osm.org website), but unless one is well versed OSM editor who is into kinky geodebugging stuff like Carto, they should probably better ignore it. (and if they are, they should really put a checkbox on that “Map data” under Layers to get the full experience, or at least install better-osm-org wrapper)


You want a OSM-based map that show oceans? Go get one. There are plenty, and some have been suggested above like https://americanamap.org, but there are others like openfreemap.org or (esp. if you prefer GoogleMaps experience) https://www.lokjo.com and many more. And if you can’t make up your mind, there is always https://openwhatevermap.xyz to browse until you find one that strikes your fancy!

2 Likes

The international language is Latin.

6 Likes

(apologies if I am fact-checking a joke here, but) I suspect it’s unlikely that one ships’ crew contacts another and says something like “veniam praeter te ad sinistram” :slight_smile:

It’s true that Latin was used on old European maps - if you look closely you can spot a couple of mare on this map (as well as some genuine “hic sunt dracones” at the bottom). In the case of the Pacific**, people with knowledge of Latin only came on the scene after people from the west and southwest had already been all around and through it, so Latin isn’t an especially “international” solution here (although I’m sure I’ve also suggested it myself jokingly in the past).

** itself a Latin-derived name of course, applied by those same late-arriving Latin speakers

1 Like

I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. None of the electronic maps I could find, including Google Maps, has the ability to put an ocean’s name near to shore, like on this paper map,


Nope. With electronic maps, each body of water has exactly one “name spot”, near its centroid. If that spot is not within the user’s viewscreen, then no label will appear!

Er, no?

The thing I use for vector tiles (Tilemaker) calculates centroids within the context of the map being created. The mapmaker of your paper map sheet has done exactly the same thing.

If I create a map of some part of England that isn’t a central bit, I know I’ll be able to find “England” labelled there somewhere, even though the centre of the whole of England is elaewhere.

PS: and of course there are a whole bunch of different ways of calculating “the centre”, but let’s ignore that here


4 Likes

For good reasons, see below :wink:.

You don’t seem to have been looking for the right tools
 on sea side, you should look for Electronic Navigational Charts. And the presentation norm for ENCs (S-52) indicates that if the displayed ENCs include a named sea and you display some part(s) of this sea on the screen (and you ask to display corresponding labels) you have to display it centered on the visible part(s) (if you look at the map “close enough” according to scamin).
By the way OpenSeaMap - The free nautical chart displays the bay.
For information, the test document of the S-52 is 256 page long but it far from being comprehensive.

1 Like

Is there an example you can link to for an electronic map that shows sea/ocean names when they’re partially in view?

I’ll answer with some more details in a MP.
Here the short answer: no as the systems I’m aware of are ECDIS (navigational systems for vessels), the public links I’m aware of are WMS, which are tuned to avoid this effect (big meta tiles so displaying the names in the center of the full geometry).
OpenCPN doesn’t seem to respect the S-52 in that aspect (but they pretend to be a “IHO S52 compliant display”).

2 Likes

Speaking of, I only discovered after writing this



that that’s exactly what they did back in 2020. The grand bargain is that S-130, the digital successor to Limits of Oceans and Seas due out next year, will refer to each ocean or sea by number, no longer by any name in English, French, or Esperanto. They hope you’re happy.

Of course, all this means is that, whatever name we give the Pacific Ocean, it’s none of the IHO’s business. Neither are MapQuest’s many memetic maps.

3 Likes

I don’t think that the first statement is objective. The second statement makes no sense. It looks more like an attempt to sway the discussion in your preferred direction.

1 Like

Not a bad move; it certainly makes their life easier and resolves the conflict. Sure, there are some drawbacks, but


Just imagine how many pointless tag renaming (like e.g. amenity=hospital to healthcare=hospital) and waster manhours OSM would’ve have avoided, if database was using just an (mostly-)numerical id like Q4941


6 Likes

I also did not know that openstreetmap.org is not the recommended viewer for end users. Is there an easily accessible list somewhere of the web-based viewers that we can use instead?

1 Like

I meant a general-purpose map like OSM Carto, not something specialised. I actually quite like the normal and humanitarian maps from OSM but as said there are some UX issues like the navigation automatically choosing and submitting. So I was wondering if there are “better” ones, or maybe some people here have recommendations? Personally I have been using Organic Maps on my phone which has been inconvenient but still better.

It sounds like you’re looking for an “end user maps and navigation site”, not just a map style. The challenge with developing a fully-featured example of that is that it costs a spectacular amount of money, which needs to come from somewhere.

One option is to rely on adverts and the sale of your personal information (the Google model). Competing with that would be difficult, since (on an Android phone or a Chrome web browser) Google already knows (and has sold) more information about you than you can possibly dream of.

Asking to be paid upfront for a service available for “free” elsewhere is going to get essentially zero paying customers in 2025, so that’s not an option.

A third option (pretty common in the Apple world) is charging a bit of cash because you’re claiming to offer something unique, still showing adverts and hoping to slot into a non-mainstream niche.

Various companies have had a go with map and geo apps over the last few years - most of the “successful” ones seem to be those that got “aqui-hired” by someone else, rather than those still ploughing their own furrow.

Not that this has anything to do with the Pacific Ocean :slight_smile:

If you have specific pain points about using osm.org for (something) it’s worth asking in another topic whether people have any specific suggestions.

2 Likes

Look, all I am saying is you can’t expect people to stop using OSM.org if you can’t offer a better alternative.

2 Likes

I see the name of the Gulf, but all it takes is one press of the “+” zoom button in the upper left, and the water is still on my screen, but the name is gone.

Does anybody have a map URL that is zoom-proof?