Add presets for buoys other than red and green

[jsavage]

Description

I would like to see more pre-defined choices for other types of buoys in Id Editor

Currently I have 2 choices: Red Buoy and Green Buoy. This is not enough because, for example: I want to add a white buoy. If I knew how to add this myself I would do it myself but I dont.

In addition to white I would like to see the following:

Yellow Buoy Black Buoy Blue Buoy

-Deleted additional comment about Seamarks in general-

Screenshots

[danieldegroot2]

The previous developers foresaw some difficulties in adding presets for seamark tagging. They decided to add these basic presets as they're easy for users to recognize. Adding more buoy types can be discussed though.

cc: @tyrasd This issue should be moved to openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema.

[jsavage]

Ok, have edited the issue to simplify the ask. For informal use, mapping what we see should be good enough. Will follow this up in openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema as suggested.

[tyrasd]

Black Buoy

this option doesn't seem to be documented on the wiki for seamark:buoy_lateral:colour and also has almost no uses on osm as far as I can see.

//edit: PS: same for blue

[tyrasd]

In general, the distribution of values is pretty red/green heavy. At first glance, having the two presets for red and green and the generic preset for all other colors looks fine to me from a preset's maintainer point of view. I don't know anything about seamarks, though, so I could missing the point why these other colors are important.

What we could do easily, is to add "Yellow Buoy", etc. as additional search terms to the generic Channel Buoy preset, so that that preset can be more easily found. Also, does it make sense to add the name Lateral Buoy as a synonym for Channel Buoy to the preset? Do the red/green buoys also have alternative names under which a user might search them for?

[jsavage]

Thanks for those stats from OSM.
Red and Green is easily explained as the most used - however, they are not necessarily the most important in any particular place.

• As a skipper, the most important marks for me are arguably those that mark a hazard. For example: Isolated Danger Marks are a type of Seamark typically used to mark hazards such as an underwater shoal or rock. They can be a post or buoy and are coloured black and red.

• A harbourmaster in the UK might well look after dozens of visitor moorings that are cylindrical buoys and coloured Orange.

• An the other hand, if I owned a hotel with visitor moorings marked with Blue spherical buoys marked with the letter V then blue would be more important to me.

• There are international standards that set out the official meaning of navigation bouys, and what they should be called IALA Buoyage System

• I don't recognise the term channel buoy. I would suggest deleting that term or marking it as questionable. The technically correct term is 'Lateral Mark'

• As far as I am aware Yellow is meaningless as a category of 'Channel Buoy' but see later for its meaning elsewhere

• Red and green buoys are most commonly simply because they are primarily used as lateral marks. ie marking the sides of a channel . In Europe and many other parts of the world Red is for the port side (left) and Green for starboard side (right). But the reverse is true in the US for example. For more detail on this: Lateral Marks

A pattern that emerges is that a buoys or seamarks have a number of properties. Some marks are posts or more substantial structures. Buoys have shape, colour, meaning as well as other characteristics such as those of lights and even top marks

And then there are other uses:

• Yellow spherical buoys are typically used for Racing Marks

• Orange Cylindrical buoys are typically visitor buoys

• White spherical buoys are often mooring buoys

• Have also seen Blue and Green visitor buoys too - not common but they have their place UK blue cylindrical visitors buoy example Also Blue conical buoys

• Black buoys are hard to see so probably the least common but they do exist.

So, its complicated. However, I think there is a case for separating the recording of formal navigation marks and those with other uses. The former is available as a data source. Admiralty Digital List of Lights

Its this latter issue that I feel we should have more support for in ID to support the inclusion of buoyage used in tourism, recreation and sport.

The ones I want to start with this month happen to be white.

[k-yle]

@tyrasd would you accept a PR to add various seamark presets? Some straightforward ones to start with could be:

EDIT: list deleted so that we have a single source of truth in #683

[tyrasd]

Sure, why not. I haven't looked at each individual tag you proposed in detail yet, but I guess most should be relatively painless to model in the tagging schema. The main "difficulty" is probably to find good icons and reasonably understandable preset labels.

Before this gets lost in this thread (and because it doesn't necessarily have much to do with the initial issue here): Would you mind opening a new issue for this (maybe similar to the collection issue #529). Including the corresponding tags and current usage numbers would also be very much appreciated. :slightly_smiling_face:

[1ec5]

What we could do easily, is to add "Yellow Buoy", etc. as additional search terms to the generic Channel Buoy preset, so that that preset can be more easily found. Also, does it make sense to add the name Lateral Buoy as a synonym for Channel Buoy to the preset? Do the red/green buoys also have alternative names under which a user might search them for?

If I’m not mistaken, the mapping from colors (that lay mappers can observe) and their meanings (requiring specialized knowledge) differs from region to region. The IALA defines two regions with contradictory meanings for buoys (apologies to those with red–green color blindness):

As if that weren’t challenging enough, there are many regional conventions. The U.S. alone has four different marking systems on public waters, not to mention private systems, with various conflicts among them. Yellow is reserved for “special aids” under USATONS/IALA-B, while on the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) yellow is the color of all navigational aids. The ICW system primarily uses symbols, not colors, to distinguish directions, but the buoys themselves are red and green, so I wonder if it’s even appropriate to provide top-level presets by color versus relegating this detail to a field.

[jsavage]

That's true. The meaning of different coloured buoys may vary from one location to another. I cant solve that issue from here. As the OP however, what I can do is request the ability to use Id Editor to capture what we can all see out on the water. With all due respect, the fact that the most common colours are red and green is completely irrelevant. So if I see a white buoy, that's what I would like to be able to represent in OSM in the quickest and easiest possible way.

The meaning, by the way, doesn't in my view need to be discovered or encoded for the mapped information to be useful. Its all about the context. How you interpret a buoy may also depend on what vessel you are.

[1ec5]

Yes, my point is that I think these three separate presets are confusing to lay mappers. If I want to map a yellow buoy but see the options “Red Buoy”, “Green Buoy”, and “Channel Buoy”, I’m left wondering how to tag a… regular buoy, not knowing what a “channel buoy” is. If there’s only a “Channel Buoy” preset, I’m slightly less confused; I might just choose that one as the most likely preset.

Regardless, the Channel Buoy preset should have a Color field. ideditor/schema-builder#26 adds a colour field type, but since we probably don’t want mappers recording the precise faded color of a buoy here, it could be a simple combo field.

[k-yle]

I agree with @1ec5 , there shouldn't be separate presets based on the colour.

But one problem is that there is no such thing as a 'regular buoy'. broadly speaking, there're 6 main types of buoys & beacons, which conveniently matches how the seamark tagging system works.

• lateral buoys (more commonly known as channel buoys)
• mooring buoys
• isolated danger buoys
• cardinal (danger) buoys
• safe water buoys
• special purpose buoys.

For someone with little knowledge about seamarks, choosing one of these 6 options is going to be complicated. Currently iD only has presets for the first 3.

I personally think seamark:type=buoy_special_purpose should be the default preset, perhaps called "Generic Buoy". There could be 5 other presets for the other categories above, for people who understand the difference. Each preset would have a colour field.

[jsavage]

Sorry, but I do not understand the resistance implied above..... In my not inconsiderable experience on the water, Special purpose buoys are rare with the exception of yellow racing buoys of which we have plenty in UK waters. These are easy to recognise both in theory and in practice..... The rest of this response including photos and screenshots is below since this email reply does not support markdown or the embedded content.

James

[1ec5]

Hi James, unfortunately your images didn’t make it into this GitHub ticket, but they sound like they’d be useful for understanding where you’re coming from. For my part, I have no problem with what you’re suggesting, except if there are any presets whose names or raw tags imply more than what mappers would see, then we should leverage the options to scope presets to particular regions. We definitely have the capability to differentiate between IALA A/B and the rest, but the existing presets need to be cleaned up a bit.

[jsavage]

Thanks. I will try and fix.

[jsavage]

OK, lets try again with images this time. Special purpose buoys are rare with the exception of yellow racing buoys of which we have plenty in UK waters. These are easy to recognise both in theory and in practice.

Note that these Special marks are trivially easy to recognise and distinguish from Cardinal Marks.

Incidentally, it is misleading to think of Cardinal Marks as 'danger' buoys. They do relate to dangers but they principally indicate where it is safe to navigate. For example this one indicates that safe water lies to the north. The others cardinals are East, West, and South.

Isolated Danger Marks and Safe Water Marks - these are different again

Lateral / Channel marks are the most prolific. Since these are Red and Green, they are also easy to distinguish from all the above. Here are two examples I happened to photograph this year. Note the shape too. In the UK our green channel marks are 'conical' in shape and the red ones are more like a 'can'. If we can't deal with Iala A and B, then the answer should simply be to record what can be seen at least in terms of colour and shape. (Ideally light characteristics too).

But I digress, this post was not really intended to be about any of the above. It was and still is a simple request to enable me and others to record buoys that are not necessarily used for Navigation but for other purposes (as previously explained). I am not sure it would be right to classify them as Special. In the absence of a defined meaning I suppose that a category of 'Other' might be more appropriate.

Failing all the above, perhaps we should not bother with the colours. However, I think that would be a missed opportunity.

James

[jsavage]

1ec5 - thanks for clarification. I think I need to better understand : "presets whose names or raw tags imply more than what mappers would see, then we should leverage the options to scope presets to particular regions." Is there a page that describes the current presets for this editor that you are concerned about?

As for IALA A and B. While this is probably the most technical thing about buoyage I don't think it should ever change what is displayed to a user. It also only relates to the channel markers. So a buoy that is a Red Can in Real life should always be charted as a Red Can. Not as a red post or a red can - that would be confusing and wrong. If some characteristics are not known then these details could be added later. A skipper sees a buoy or marker and it is he who had to decide how he needs to interpret it taking into account the Iala region and other context such as the direction of buoyage, what vessel he is in charge of etc.

[1ec5]

Thanks for the images; you’re infinitely more experienced than I am in this area, so I appreciate your effort in explaining the system to me. As I’ve been told, part of the problem is that the established tags in OSM very closely reflect the distinctions that a nautical map would make, so they don’t necessarily answer the question “What is it?” as most primary feature tags do. The entire seamark tagging documentation was written by the OpenSeaMap developer without undergoing a formal proposal process, during which it probably would’ve received some scrutiny about internationalization.

The buoy scheme leaves no room to say that a feature is “just a buoy” or “just a yellow buoy”; it forces you to also specify the function: https://github.com/openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema/issues/512#issuecomment-1338507357. This is not necessarily a problem for the red and green buoys, but with other colors, there can be a problem if the same color and shape means two different things depending on the marking system. I may be overstating the severity of the issue, because this conflict between a seamark:type=buoy_safe_water and a seamark:type=buoy_isolated_danger has actually been resolved as of 2003; the guide I was consulting made it sound like there could still be USWMS markings out in the wild.

If other cases like this remain, we can limit the presets by geography in order to continue to provide the color-based presets, if you think that’s the most important thing to distinguish buoys by. Back when the buoy presets were added in openstreetmap/iD#5297, iD didn’t have the capability to limit a preset to a particular region, but that is possible today.

[jsavage]

When we record other objects we often have to fallback to something generic like 'building' despite the fact that it may have a more specific name or use. So here the fall back should generally be Navigation Buoy. We should probably also have choices for other navigation aids such as posts too. I don't think we can go too far wrong if we stick to encoding what is there. We should be able to leave the interpretation to the mariner. Unfortunately, I see far too many navigation buoys that have actually been encoded as navigation posts. Whilst the two look completely different they have the same colour and top marks but encoding them incorrectly reduces the confidence that people will have in the information.

On Thu, 8 Dec 2022 at 09:04, Minh Nguyễn @.***> wrote:

Thanks for the images; you’re infinitely more experienced than I am in this area, so I appreciate your effort in explaining the system to me. As I’ve been told, part of the problem is that the established tags in OSM very closely reflect the distinctions that a nautical map would make, so they don’t necessarily answer the question “What is it?” as most primary feature tags do. The entire seamark tagging documentation was written by the OpenSeaMap developer without undergoing a formal proposal process, during which it probably would’ve received some scrutiny about internationalization.

The buoy scheme https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Seamarks/Buoys leaves no room to say that a feature is “just a buoy” or “just a yellow buoy”; it forces you to also specify the function: #512 (comment) https://github.com/openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema/issues/512#issuecomment-1338507357. This is not necessarily a problem for the red and green buoys, but with other colors, there can be a problem if the same color and shape means two different things depending on the marking system. I may be overstating the severity of the issue, because this conflict between a seamark:type=buoy_safe_water https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:seamark:type%3Dbuoy_safe_water and a seamark:type=buoy_isolated_danger https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:seamark:type%3Dbuoy_safe_water has actually been resolved as of 2003; the guide I was consulting made it sound like there could still be USWMS markings out in the wild.

[image: red and white stripes] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1231218/206396750-b543fdd4-439d-4fb8-92c3-2d3fff5dc72f.png

If other cases like this remain, we can limit the presets by geography in order to continue to provide the color-based presets, if you think that’s the most important thing to distinguish buoys by. Back when the buoy presets were added in openstreetmap/iD#5297 https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/pull/5297, iD didn’t have the capability to limit a preset to a particular region, but that is possible today.

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[1ec5]

When we record other objects we often have to fallback to something generic like 'building' despite the fact that it may have a more specific name or use. So here the fall back should generally be Navigation Buoy.

I agree 100%. But far as I can tell, no generic tag corresponding to “navigation buoy” has been documented so far, so there’s nothing we can do in this repository to fall back to such a preset. If there is a good generic tag for it that’s widely used but not documented yet, then certainly it can be documented and supported here. Otherwise, there should be a broader discussion in the tagging forum, on the tagging mailing list, or more formally through the wiki’s proposal process.

[jsavage]

Returning to this topic. I am not sure it makes sense to tag an generic "navigation buoy" because if you know something is a navigation mark you should be able to catagorize it. If not its just a post, pile or beacon if fixed to the ground or a buoy if it floats. Colour should not be mandatory. I also worry about forcing people to assign a meaning - that's the job of a navigator.