Mapping White Horses so they appear

[adgough]

Not actual ones of course…

I was out and about having a walk around the Weymouth White Horse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmington_White_Horse), so I set off my phone’s GPS tracker with the intention of mapping it out. It wasn’t on any OSM-based map I’ve ever seen. Several falls and tumbles later (ouch, limestone is sharp!!!) I discovered, to my dismay, that someone had already mapped it.
Ah well, I’d like the bet that I’m kinda unique in having physical OSM battle scars…

Several white horses are mapped, as man_made=geoglyph, but only get rendered on the Cycle and MapQuest layers for some odd reason, which is pretty sad, especially for works of art like this one: http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1618450

How would I go about getting man_made=geoglyph rendered on the Standard OSM map layers? If that can’t be changed, what solution would be best to get them to appear?

On the upside, I’ve just discovered how fun it is to do GPS mapping stuff with OSM!

[hadw]

Mapping to make things appear is called “mapping for the renderer” and is generally considered a bad thing. You should map to accurately represent what is there, whether or not it actually appears on a any particular rendered map layer.

I suspect the legitimate way of getting something to render is to map the area of grass than surrounds it and hope it is a different green from national parks.You will almost certainly need to a use a multipolygon to cut it out of the grass. The grass might be natural or landuse, depending on whether or not it is managed. surface=chalk might be correct for the horse, but unlikely to be rendered. natital=bare_rock is probably wrong, because the features is man_made. (Unfortunately, I think grass is often mapped for the renderer, because the most appropriate coding doesn’t always render.)

Rendering them on the standard layer probably wouldn’t harm the use of the map but might not be justified from a purely cost benefit point of view.

[adgough]

@hadw

Mapping to make things appear is called “mapping for the renderer” and is generally considered a bad thing. You should map to accurately represent what is there, whether or not it actually appears on a any particular rendered map layer.

Oh yes, I quite appreciate that. As I say, the current system works fine on other layers, so it’s not really the data that needs changing.

I suspect the legitimate way of getting something to render is to map the area of grass than surrounds it and hope it is a different green from national parks.You will almost certainly need to a use a multipolygon to cut it out of the grass. The grass might be natural or landuse, depending on whether or not it is managed. surface=chalk might be correct for the horse, but unlikely to be rendered. natital=bare_rock is probably wrong, because the features is man_made. (Unfortunately, I think grass is often mapped for the renderer, because the most appropriate coding doesn’t always render.)

That worked nicely! The Osmington horse was in the middle of a single heath area, so that was quite easy to do without messing up the data. Thanks for the advice!