Too many tiny private airports on the map at small scales #1143
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I think it would be best to have a tag like regular_commercial_traffic=yes or something like that. That would probably be best discussed on the tagging mailing list. The best we can do with the data we have is check for the presence of an IATA ref. That would not exclude any important airports, but as mentioned here, it might include some tiny airports. |
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2014-12-01 19:22 GMT+01:00 math1985 notifications@github.com:
yes, something along these lines. There could be several airport classes. |
We could do that, but I think we should be humble and realize we are only one of the data consumers. I think it would be much better if the taggers decided to come up with a scheme and we follow it, rather than the other way around. |
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Is there a strong correlation between importance of airport and its size? Maybe using way_area would be a good idea (it would be necessary to improve tagging, as most people tag airports as node, but it would require no new tags or changing guidelines). |
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Yes, I think size is an important factor. You could argue that military air fields are less important than civil airports, and military air fields can be quite big, but in general I think most important airports are big and most unimportant ones are small. |
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Most airports are mapped as nodes and not every airport has a clear boundary making mapping as polygons difficult - where would you for example draw the boundary of http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/276384892. A good criterion for the importance of an airport would be the runway length. This is of course difficult to determine since the runway is a separate object - you would need some kind of proximity query for that. The shown example is by the way not even a very extreme case - there are areas much worse like http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/5.5846/-71.3885 - on the other hand there are also areas where airports could well be displayed earlier than z=10 - in particular in high latitude areas where air transport is often the primary mode of transport. |
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Interesting, I shall ponder a tagging listserv message. To that end, looking at the tagging scheme for airports, the ICAO code does seem to differentiate the big from the little airport. Here's a list of all the ICAO codes in the USA on Wikipedia, and not any of these tiny airports are on there. There is a tagging preset for ICAO codes on iD and from what I've seen, they're fairly commonly populated. The FAA ref on the other hand applies to all airports, big and small. Similarly, the IATA Code is only applicable to "big" airports. So, could the logic for the tag be like: ❓ |
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@talllguy Overpass turbo: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/5oQ EDIT: Originally a different airport was an example, but in that case IATA code tag was a mistake. |
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In Europe, there are many tiny airports with ICAO code, such as Ameland or Kitzebourg Ultralight Airfield. Not so much tiny airports with IATA code, but still some. |
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@math1985 @mkoniecz Ah, darn, ok thanks for the insight on that idea. I suppose it'd be better to develop a field for airport importance, if this is even an issue. I do think it'd be nice for other cartographic renderings of OSM data to have a better way to differentiate large and small airports. |
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@talllguy For Mapbox Streets we look for a number of things to get a rough idea of rendering importance:
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I noticed that some time ago when I was looking at the airport rendering that way_area would be a good indicator however as has been pointed out not all airports have ways some are just areas.So I tweaked a few areas in the UK and looked at the top 20 busiest airports in the world, etc but I think Tokyo, etc had nodes. And I paused changing them all. Personally I think that we should be encouraging tagging for ways rather than the old school and primitive system of using nodes. It is 2014 folks! I think we should just use way_area and that would encourage better tagging practices. It is a simple solution/method. No need to over-engineer this. |
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@ajashton Thanks so much for the input, and for citing that aerodrome type tag. I clicked through to the wiki and found there is a proposed aerodrome type tag. I will weigh in on the discussion there, and I think some of the other commenters might want to as well. Perhaps if that is formally adopted we could add that to the mix here. also to @Rovastar
That is not a bad idea, though in the short term the map might suffer. |
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Airports are way too prominent now that they're purple and solid color. Link |
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@purpleplanes People proposed checking area of airport, checking presence of icao and iata tags, whether the name or name:en tags contain clue words such as "international" or "heliport". What would work in this case? |
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The root of the problem is really that anything a plane lands at is tagged with |
Yes, I will post about it on a tagging mailing list. |
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Yikes that purple is pretty bold. I'll look for the discussion on tagging |
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So there is no good way to check whatever airport is tiny. Is there some tag that would allow to check whatever it is private? And is it a good indicator of importance? |
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A quick comment: this is a long term historic tagging problem: at one stage we had at least 3 tags for aeroway: airport, aerodrome & airstrip which were used in decreasing order of importance. There was an undiscussed mechanical edit which changed them all to aerodrome. I cant locate it quickly, but IIRC it was around mid-2009. It has just got worse because many more minor to extremely minor places have been added (for instance locations where it is possible to land a plane on glaciers in the alps, which are not aerodromes in any sense at all). |
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@matkoniecz Did anything come out of the discussion on the mailing list? |
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Just use way_area. |
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@math1985
Using way_area is not bad, rendering depending on feature density would be cool. |
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way_area is not perfect, but better than alternatives including current state. |
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I know it is not perfect but other solutions seem to be over-engineering and need other or new subjective tags in the carto database. Sure there will always be edge cases but they will be rare and no solution is perfect. |
Ugh. So we used to have sane tagging, then someone got rid of it? |
Part of this problem is that airports are rendered to early. I only render them from >=1:250k. That is roughly equivalent to the Z12 viewport in this image: http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/153353016#map=12/39.7385/-86.3711 While the view you showed is something like 1:1M (Z10). Indianapolis is a huge city, it seems to cover an area roughly equivalent to something like 30x30 km, which is almost the size of an entire province here in the Netherlands... Anyway, it seems most of these small airports with IATA code also have an access=private tag, so an adjustment like this might work if you want to maintain the Z10 rendering: Major airports: Minor airports: Heliports, using the latest tagging scheme This must be combined with dedicated starting zoom scales for the display. |
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Unfortunately at most 2,7% of all aerodromes have access=*, it's not even on the list of taginfo combinations: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/aeroway=aerodrome#combinations |
Even so, with the queries I suggested, including checking the IATA tag, you will probably weed out quite a lot of the clutter. And it is likely that more aerodromes will get the access tag, once it makes a difference in the rendering... |
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Revisiting the issue after reading this entry. We still don't have any good measure for recognizing important airports, but for Indianapolis area multiple simple conditions filtering would be quite effective:
So about 95% current airports there would be hidden on z10, even if it's still quite loose condition set. Even small airports could have all these properties too, but at least it shouldn't filter out any important airport and it gives us wide margin to think about something more strict (which probably means collecting the data for all the most important airports in the world and finding the common thread). Maybe just pushing the rest to z11 would be enough. [EDIT:] of course it's rather z10/z11 than z16/z17, as I wrote previously, these errors are now corrected. |
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Sounds good for now. |
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Maybe another source of data: WikiData is really powerful, once you get the hang of it :) |
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FYI: I Implemented the suggestion from mboeringa in german style fork. |
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@giggls any screenshots of how it looks around one of the areas in this thread? |
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Is this really deployed already? I don't see the difference in the number of airport icons: https://www.openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=10&lat=39.80332&lon=-86.33519&layers=B000TF |
+1. I think it is not yet deployed, it was only committed to master yesterday. Clearly, a private airport like this one, should no longer display once implemented based on its tagging: |
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https://www.openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=10&lat=39.75167&lon=-86.14035 shows the current version now. Re-Rendering is not done that often on this server as you are used to from tile.osm.org If you like to have a tile re-rendered faster just use the /dirty trick on the particular tile: The version (git hash) currently active on or tiles-erver is available at http://tile.openstreetmap.de/ |
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For me making minor airports to show from z13 is too far. After all this distinction is rather subtle - we don't have clear definition of major and minor airports. I guess z11 would be enough, even in such extreme case as Indianapolis. Still I find my query to be better, even including nodes (major airports are probably easy to draw): |
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You have an "acces" in your query, german style is a lot stricter actually http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/j9J Am 07.10.2016 um 13:05 schrieb kocio-pl:
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Thanks! I've pasted a link to the corrected query. But it's still weaker than mine because of ICAO. |
gravitystorm#1143 Conflicts: views_osmde/view-point.sql views_osmde/view-polygon.sql
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@utak: I render all airports with IATA tag and access != private in z10-z12 and all airports in z13. I did not consider ICAO because all airports with IATA code also seem to have an ICAO code. |
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So ICAO can just promote more careful tagging (just like excluding nodes), but is not necessary. I like your code (type labels make it clear), but I think z11 (or z12) for small would be better for any other place, which is not that loaded with small airports. Tuning for extreme case (z13) will be too strict everywhere else. What do you think? |
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Note there are already 36 cases with iata=none or iata=N/A - using this as a rating criterion could encourage such tagging. I would still think using runway length as a rating criterion is probably the most universal approach. Would be great to see if that is practically feasible in live rendering. |
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@imagico I'm sure you are right about runway length, but one counter-example comes to mind: Machrihanish (Campbeltown) Airport has the longest runway in Scotland (was US AFB with Galaxy G5, SR-71 etc. visiting). With under 10k passengers it is one of the smaller ones, but still 14th overall in Scotland. |
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Yes, military airports often follow different rules regarding runway length and this often continues if an airport is re-purposed for civilian use. The idea here is however not to have a fixed threshold like only show airports with a runway of more than 2000m at z12 but to have a rating criterion that allows prioritization and this way makes sure important airports are shown while less important ones are dropped where things are dense. To do this really well will require preprocessing but it would be interesting to see to what extent this also works ad hoc. |
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@imagico I consider IATA tagged on airports where there is no such code a bug. |
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If it helps, here's what I'm currently doing in a different style: https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/SomeoneElse-style/blob/master/style.lua#L2303 That suppresses disused ones, includes only non-military ones with an IATA code and renders grass strips less prominently. That works for the UK, but "non-military with an IATA code" may need expanding elsewhere (e.g. the US). I take the points above about use and misuse of IATA codes, but it works well enough to be useful. Edit: See https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/map/map.html#zoom=12&lat=52.3575&lon=-0.16 as an example (note the difference between Alconbury and Wyton - one is tagged as military and one (incorrectly) isn't. |
Any suggestions on how to handle lots of tiny private airports? It doesn't look like there is a way to differentiate between tags but perhaps only airports with an ICAO or IATA ref should appear at the z10ish.
Perhaps only areas or relations with the
aeroway=aerodromecould be shown. Any way to handle this programmatically?The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: