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. 🙂

[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.