How to tag minor hills?

My first post on the forums - I only recently discovered they exist!

I was thinking of adding the names of the Gog Magog hills, South East of Cambridge. You can see them here:
http://www.npemap.org.uk/tiles/map.html#549,252,1

On OSM the area is here:
http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.1568&lon=0.1832&zoom=14&layers=B00FTF

I’ve added “Gog Magog Hills” as a named place=locality, so that should hopefully show up on the next render of the area. The NPE map shows a number of individually named hills. I hesitate to use place=locality for these too as I’m using that tag already to cover the general vicinity (which I assume is proper usage?). I’m not too keen on marking them as natural=peak either, since a) I don’t have a good fix on what the highest point of each hill is, they’re not even necessarily distinct peaks b) NPE doesn’t give elevation data for them anyhow and c) these are tiny hills - tiny tiny tiny. In another part of the country they wouldn’t be called hills; it’s just because Cambridgeshire is so flat! Having them appear with a “peak” symbol like the top of some mountain would be pretty misleading on the map.

I really just want a reasonably sane tag for naming hills that aren’t necessarily very significant but do have a (potentially) locally known name. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Cheers,
Mark

Well you are right that natural=peak seems to befor high mountains, but that might jus tbe because there is a pretty big one depicted on that page. You could always take a pic of your hill and post is beside the current picture. place=locality seems fine as well since it seems to be used for points of interest.

natural=peak seems to be a better fit to your hill, if you want to you can invent a new tag called ele_estimate=5m, perhaps put a little note=“I don’t know the hieght and have no referecnce to this is a ver rought estimate of the height”. You could also use natural=hill which is used 3 times in Europe… :slight_smile:

Yep! As well as the picture on that page, the triangular symbol used to render “natural=peak” on the map looks like the traditional symbol for the peak of a mountain. These hills are probably only about 50m tall, relative to the surrounding country side. It’s a very flat area, the locals get excited when they see any kind of slope and call it a hill :wink:

Yes, I was thinking a natural=hill tag would be useful actually, although I guess it’s probably not rendered at the moment… It’d be nice to have such a tag for features that aren’t particularly navigationally interesting (can’t use them as landmarks from far away, for instance) but have some kind of local significance. This might also do for named random inclines, or “shoulders” of real mountains that aren’t really a proper peak in their own right.

Maybe I can tag them natural=peak for now, so that their names appear on the map, and in the meantime I can think about writing a natural=hill feature proposal to make this more official. I might even be able to climb some of them (depending on access) and take a rough elevation estimate with the GPS.

Cheers,
Mark

Are there any good signs for hills then? What I see on Swedish maps is just a name and no icon, so a place=locality to get the name to render plus a natural=hill to describe what you found.

And if you start using natural=hill then ohers might do it as well… If you map it with GPS then you really show dedication. Anyways you could always ask for natural=hill to be rendered in mpanik layer via a http://trac.openstreetmap.org ticket.

The npemap.org.uk (out of copyright ordnance survey) mostly just shows a name and no icon. I was thinking it would be nice to provide metadata to indicate it’s a hill, in case we want an icon - a blunt version of the peak icon, maybe :wink:

I do like the idea of using natural=hill and place=locality for the moment. I didn’t realise that was what you meant earlier but I think it’s an excellent idea. I think I’ll do that, thanks!

The GPS-ing is more a matter of whether I can physically get onto that land but I can have a look down there; there are probably some footways and bridleways to map around there in any case. Thanks for the trac link too, I didn’t realise we could request rendering there, I think I’ll take a look around that too!

Thanks very much,
Mark

It’s discussion that makes things obvious. IMHO it’s important to make bold tagging statements in OSM because the standard way might not be the best way. :slight_smile: So thanks for the chat.

http://trac.openstreetmap.org isn’t really supposed to be used for just random requests. In this example I doubt you will get a peak icon for natural=hill, but if you have some kind of icon for a feature that is used widely on other maps then it’ll have higher probabilties to get included.

Getting colider=hadron and colider=proton to render might be hard, e.g. the LHC