Yes, of course. I should have mentioned that. One should have some first hand experience, see some Strava heat, or have a trail in an official source (with compatible license).
I don’t generally have a problem with micro mapping, but…
It is hard to tell from the hillshade (lidar) how high these cliffs are. If they are only one meter or so (I am unsure what the exact cutoff should be), they probably shouldn’t be mapped, or at the very least, they should be tagged with their height. Also, to be a cliff it should be nearly vertical, and in some of the cliffs that have been mapped it is not clear that they are. Maybe they are, maybe they are not.
BTW, there are lots of streams that one can step over around here (US) that have been mapped.
Fact is, it can look really odd on maps, but gives a good idea of the landscape. In fact I think I like it but in the future I’ll maybe try to render short cliffs a bit smaller on Opensnowmap
We don’t map for the render and we don’t leave anything out for the renderer. OSM is not a map, but a geodatabase. If you think this is overloaded, then render your own map without natural=cliff.
Oh yes - I find these examples really harmless. I recommend a trip to Saxon Switzerland to anyone for whom this is already too overloaded.
If you think that’s bad, have a look at the southwestern United States. It’s an absolute mess of excessively mapped cliffs. See here, here, here, and discussion here:
It’s not even really wrong, it just shows that mapping every cliff in a landscape that is all cliffs basically amounts to custom drawn contour lines. Certainly doesn’t make for a useful map.
maybe the cartographic visualization of cliffs should be less impactful in a landscape that is all cliffs? I do not think it is wrong to map cliffs where they are, and if there are many, unless the map takes particular precaution, it will look like a black blob as the standard way to show cliffs is with high prominence, calibrated for areas where a cliff should be highlighted because there are not so many.
I wouldn’t be so sure about this. Certainly you would want to know about all cliffs when walking there.
Sure, but I’d prefer a map using the LIDAR hillshading directly as a background with contour lines generated from the same high resolution source. If a map has those two things I can see where the cliffs are quite well. Adding traced cliff lines on top of this just adds clutter and makes the map harder to read.
It is pretty difficult to tell from a DEM (lidar may be the underlying collection method, but what most people look at, is a hillshade of the resulting DEM) if there is a cliff or not. For example, in some areas of the US, the post spacing for 3DEP is 1/3 arc second, which at the equator, is about 10 meters. If the difference in heights between adjacent posts was, for example, 6 meters, it could be a vertical drop (and therefore a cliff and dangerous), or it could be a 30 degree slope (and not a cliff nor much of a danger generally). This is why we, and others, map “break lines”, such as cliffs. Having said that, in the case cited by the OP, without some photos, or an onsite visit, I don’t think we can really tell if these are cliffs or not. If we were looking at the actual lidar data, we would be looking at a point cloud, and, with the right software, it may be possible to get an idea as to the existance of a cliff.
First of all, thanks to the contributors who agree that I’ve mapped correctly and point out other examples with even more complex cliffs. I greatly appreciate!
As other contributors reported/rated you, @dpolovinkin , like in this CS or here, you often perform subjective mass deletions, labeling various elements as useless (for you). You did it again in this CS. Agree with @Mammi71, some people would consider this vandalism.
I’ve been adding cliffs since 2013 in Micheville, Mersch, Haard alongside other contributors, not solely relying on LIDAR. Stereo from Lu and OSMF chairman, has also followed this approach in Lux-city, again here and Kirchberg. The intricate and numerous cliffs reflect the natural complexity of the region you referenced. They are one of the reasons why it has been added to the Unesco Geoparks and it is visited by many tourists. Over a decade, no complaints arose except now from you and your friend ex-tomolobla, seemingly due to our conflict over his numerous abusive deletions of existing ways, some even having structures.
According you, the non-existing track added by myself, come on it is literally visible on SPW’s most recent aerial photos. I don’t get why you complain about it…
The blocks I had are not about the cliffs but about an ongoing conflict with your friend ex-tomolobla, AKA Kugelbaum (providing conveniently misplaced photo shots, I’ve proven so here) and his other sock-puppets AKA grauwutayette, eyasonu, etc (at least 8 accounts) for deleting ways which I’ve proven existing. The DWG admin in charge of the ticket promised a conclusion here to resolve it, but we were never given any. In the mean time, your friend continued the deletions and changed account when exposed by my evidences. Stereo suggested me to discuss this in the IRC channel but because our tiny LU community lacking responsiveness and DWG’s inaction, instead of coming in this forum, I preferred warning contributors on changesets with evidences and via fixme tags with explanations. The admins considered that ad-hominem, with which I disagree (read definition), since I’ve given evidences and explanations directly on the data. NB: despite my blocks, I’m still here with my account, not ashamed because I know I stand right.
for you “often” is this one time before in Romania?
To clarify for others - back then I deleted a lot of mechanically imported trees in Bucharest, many of which were obviously incorrect (standing on the streets, buildings, sometimes 15 trees instead of 5 in real life, so on), and remapped some of them as wood areas - and my mistake is that I didn’t talk with community before, but after reverts and warning-block (not a proper ones which you had, just saying) I’ve chatted with them in Telegram and indeed most people agreed that such tree mapping didn’t make much sense. It’s just that I started cleaning the map before asking people, that’s my bad, yes.
ok, great you didn’t do it lots of times, and important you are writing here and explaining those accusations against you are unfounded. It is important people are researching well before publicly accusing others for vandalism. Still, in the case of the deleted cliffs in Luxembourg it is seems they were not justified (at least the edit comment doesn’t suggest it) and these should be reverted.
UPDATE: @dpolovinkin thank you for reverting the deletions of cliffs in LUX!
Just to answer that question - I don’t do any “special handling”** on cliffs on my raster or Garmin maps; the representation on raster maps is unchanged from how OSM Carto did it 10 years ago. I’ve not actually looked at how “small diameter” rock pillars are mapped in OSM - there aren’t too many of them near me! “large diameter” ones I’d expect to see as “circular cliffs” but I haven’t investigated that either.
** “special handling” means looking at other tags and seeing if some other representation would be better.than he vanilla one for that feature type. As an example, the “buildingness” of a ruined building is shown slightly differently to a regular building, and “ruined” can be implied by 3 or 4 different tagging styles.
The difference here is that we have a pile of different tags to explain what’s going on here - river vs stream, intermittent, flood_prone and more.
Is there anything similar for cliffs? How high does something have to be before it counts as a “cliff” in OSM? My naive thought as a mapper and with “what people map as cliffs in the UK” would be 3m vertical or so, but there might be different opinions elsewhere.
Is anyone aware of an attempt in OSM data to say “how much of a cliff this is”?
and the mapping discussed in this topic is near the area of 