[Solved] Lakes named as a group? Does not have induvidual names

General talk
1

Hi,

I’m mapping my local area’s lakes and have encountered a problem with naming the lakes.

You see many places there will be two or three lakes which named and locally known as a group. Example: “Valdsvik lakes”
Sometimes there are sensible ways to name them like upper and lower x lake. But other times there is no meaningful way of naming a indivudal lake.

It would be very usefull to have the name for the lakes on the map so one could easily know which lakes one were at.

Is there a way to accomplish this? Surely this has been a problem for someone before :slight_smile:

2
3

I’m not sure there is a particularly good single approach, these are alternative which come to mind:

  • Map all the lakes/ponds as a relation tagged natural=water and with role=outer. This sort of falls down if individual lakes also have names, because we then will be mapping that something is a lake twice.
  • Use a relation of type=site. Many of these exist in the database, but AFAIK are not consumed by any significant rendering program.
  • Fudge it and use a place=locality, either as a node (as in this case https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3041723574)), or perhaps rather better, as a relation (perhaps as type site) with a locality subtype.

I imagine an expected behaviour with rendering would be that the label text would be blue as for other water features.

Other aspects which will affect the choice are:

  • How big are the lakes? “the Great Lakes” are a group of lakes, but I would not recommend any of the above approaches for them. In practice my answers assume a multitude of small lakes, too small, for the most part, to be named individually.
  • I’m not aware of a good single word for a ‘group of lakes’ comparable to archipelago for a group of islands, and I cant find any usage on taginfo.
  • There’s currently a thread on the OSM reddit subforum about named peaks of one mountain which raises similar types of questions.
4

Thank you for the input, I will group them with realtions and name the relation.
And experiment with the suggestions from SK53.

My wished outcome would be for the rendering to be a label text with the name in blue, exactly.
Yes all the lakes are small and don’t have their own names.

Thank you for your answears :slight_smile: