Thorsten,
Many thanks for your helpful comments!
On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Thorsten Kurz tkurz@gmx.net wrote:
Hi Mohamed,
"Don't tag for the renderer" is a general rule of OSM, which actually means "Don't deliberately enter data incorrectly for the renderer".
Personally I prefer to speak in a way that can be understood by the people I'm speaking to and in the same vein, I prefer to tag my data in a way that can be understood by my favourite OSM maps. So I can understand that it's frustrating if your work is ignored by a map that you care about.
I certainly see your point here!
One way to deal with it would be to draw the dam as a simple way instead
of an area and tag it with waterway=dam and highway=*. 1136 or 1.21% percent of dams worldwide are tagged this way, e.g. in Montsalvens (http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/37300714).
I was initially going to ask if that was legitimate, since it seemed the simplest solution. But I was not happy with that approach. I accept (not too happily) the highway=bridge construct, since the main purpose of the bridge is to carry the highway. But the purpose of the dam is not to carry the path :)