Proposal talk:Shelf

Looking at the osm-data of the Laguna di Venezia, I was astonished to find the key-value-pair 'natural=shelf'. According to my knowledge, the term 'shelf' is used in general for shallow waters in front of a coastline, a definition in a UN-Convention is "submarine areas adjacent to the coast but outside the area of the territorial sea, to a depth of 200 metres". The major part of a shelf-area is covered by water even at low tide, except the relative small area of tideland. Maybe there are some spezial meanings of the term 'shelf', but using this for an area inside the Laguna di Venezia is a bit confusing. These areas in the Laguna look like marshes, there is an existing key-value-pair 'natural=marsh' which seems to be ok to describe them, maybe special types of marshes e.g. freshwater, seawater etc. should be mentioned in a note-tag or a name-tag. If the focus is on giving information for maritime navigation, maybe it is usefull to introduce a key-value-pair 'natural=tideland' or 'natural=sands'. Looking at the big white patches on the osm-map of europe, where there are no or very few data in the osm-database, I am not shure it is a good idea to spend to much time in drawing maps of water covered areas, except in Venice, where the "streets are made out of water" ;-) osm-user: B10xxx

I founded the shelf term as a translation of the italian barena. If the translation is wrong, i have no problem to change all the area tagged in this way. --EdoM (Parliamone) 09:24, 15 June 2007 (BST)