Mississippi River Mapping?

Communities United States
1

My main mapping area in WI isn’t really close to the Mississippi, but I’ve ended up looking at it a bit, and I have a few ideas/questions:

  1. Should we map the water areas between dams as numbered navigation pools?
  2. In the area I’ve mapped, both the waterway=river and the enclosing relation for the Mississippi river have multilingual name tags. I understand keeping name tags on the way itself, but it feels like it might be easier to do the extended names on the relation. I couldn’t find any specific guidance on this on the wiki.
  3. Do we have any good sources that we can use for improving navigation on the river? (Like depth, what craft can navigate it well, more info on locks, etc)
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The Army Corps of Engineers publishes navigational charts since they are responsible for maintaining the navigability of the Mississippi River. The charts that they produce are actually quite beautiful. I printed out a set of the charts for the river near my hometown as a poster as a gift for my dad.

https://www.mvr.usace.army.mil/missions/navigation/navigation-charts/upper-mississippi-river/

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Are they licensed for us to use for OSM?

4

The Army Corps of Engineers is a part of the US Government so pretty much anything that they produce is public domain.

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5

Good point, I don’t think this has received much attention. Technically, all the names belong on the waterway relation, but the names are also on the individual waterways for backwards compatibility. The OSMUS tiles used by OpenStreetMap Americana and other maps currently only look at the individual waterways. For example, if you set the language to Menominee, it falls back to English because name:mez=* appears on only the relation, not the ways, and the linked Wikidata item also lacks a Menominee label. I’m unsure if other renderers are able to get the name tags from the waterway relations instead.

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