Relations/Proposed/Waterway

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waterway
Status: Approved (active)
Proposed by: werner2101
Tagging: type=waterway
Applies to: relation
Definition: relation for waterways and rivers
Rendered as: not rendered
Draft start: 2010-03-19
RFC start: 2010-04-01
Vote start: 2012-02-19
Vote end: 2012-04-30
The Feature Page for the approved proposal waterway can be located at Relation:waterway.


Preface

There are currently several different tagging schemas out there for waterway relations. This draft will show the differences of the existing schemas and propose the usage of type=waterway for future mapping.

Contents


The purpose of waterway relations is to have an object for each river. Common tags like references, wikipedia pages, international names only need to be added once.

Later the waterway relations can be used to form watersheds.

Tagging

Key Value Description
type waterway
waterway [river, stream, canal, drain, ditch] subtype of the waterway relation similar to key:waterway
Hint: If the waterway starts as a stream and becomes larger, then use the tag of the largest waterway (e.g. river).
name * name of the river
the international name tags name:en=, name:de, ... are recommend for large waterways
destination * (optional) name of the river, sea or ocean in which this waterway flows into. (see discussion)
ref * (optional) any kind of reference or use the specialized tags below. (See discussion for more alternatives)
ref:sandre * (optional) in France you can add the sandre reference: see French waterways wikiprojet for explanations. Sandre official Website or fr.wikipedia
ref:fgkz * (optional) in Germany you can add the FGKZ reference: de.wikipedia
ref:regine * (optional) in Norway you can add the regine reference: de.wikipedia
ref:gnis * (optional) in USA you can add the gnis reference: en.wikipedia
ref:gnbc * (optional) in Canada you can add the gnbc reference: en.wikipedia
wikipedia * (optional) Links to wikipedia pages

Members

Object type Role Recurrence Description
Way None or main_stream one or more any kind of waterway ways. They usually have a waterway=[river, canal, stream, drain, ditch] tag
no riverbank areas
Way side_stream optional waterway=river, waterway=canal, waterway=stream... a branch of main stream than return to it.
Node spring optional natural=spring The spring of the river

History of waterway relations

Existing waterway relations

Statistics

The following page shows the currently used relation tags of the latest planet file: [1]

The taggings can be summarized into:

The multipolygons are mostly waterway=riverbank areas and are not part of this proposal.

type=river schema

The proposal of the type=river (Relations/Proposed/Rivers) describes the creation of riverbank multipolygons. The riverbanks are already well defined in Tag:waterway=riverbank.

Most of the existing river relations have the sames structure as this proposal.

The discussion page of river (Talk:Relations/Proposed/Rivers) mentions relations with the type route=river.

type=collection schema

The proposal of type=collection (Relations/Proposed/Collected_Ways) mentions the usage of type=collection for all kind of ways, including river, stream, ..

type=route schema

The relation type=route (Relation:route) mentions the route type canal. There are not many usages of the route relation type for waterways.

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