I am trying to add SCUBA diving sites to the map in order to give divers helpful information on the sites and the best approach to entering the water given the near shore conditions. I also have photos I would like to share from the sites. I noticed that there are dive sites already added to maps as Tourist Attractions such as here (screenshot below). I also noticed that several awesome dive sites are not marked on the map so I tried to add them using the same category as the others already there. In both cases my edits were not applied. (see screenshot) What am I doing wrong ? Thanks for your help. Nick
Thanks for sharing this information. Bro Nick this is something new and unique, Mapping underwater. Wow it’s great, I am still surprised how you are going to pin point area in sea, undetermined territory.
Hi @VijayDesai Yes, pinpointing anything underwater is very hard. The idea here is to map the best place to enter the water with the least impact on the divers and the coral reef. The pictures of the creatures encountered on previous dives will give visitors an idea on what is located in the near vicinity but until we get GPS to work underwater, it will be hard to map the actual location of the coral features Thanks - Nick
Hi @Nick-Hobgood I suspect that these are not good contributions for Maps as they don’t have an address and the average person cannot visit them. What do you think @Flash ?
Thanks for the note @PaulPavlinovich . One might argue that Mount Everest is not a location that the average person can visit but it gets its own Tourist Attraction marker.
Thanks @PaulPavlinovich - I get it but some consistency would be nice to help us in determining what is allowable and what is not. The attached screenshot shows 9 dive sites in Bonaire posted in different categories such as Tourist Attraction, Scenic Spot and Vista Point. Not to sound like a 5 year old, but why can Bonaire do it and not Timor-Leste ?
@Nick-Hobgood , Paul is correct, these features cannot be mapped.
There’s really no inconsistency here, these clearly don’t meet multiple requirements to be mapped. Features on the map must have proper names, not descriptions. They also need to have proper categories, if you can’t find a proper category then it’s likely not mappable. If dive sites were being accepted then there would be a dive site category. “Tourist Attraction” is not to be used to put in everything else for which an appropriate category cannot be found. Scenic Spot is meant for a scenic spot that has a proper name, such as those you can find with official signage at the side of highway; not as a way to get a dive site onto the map.
Your other examples are not inconsistency, but rather are people mapping inappropriately. With thousands of edits a day from the public and many other resources you can find examples of pretty well every map rule being broken and squeezing through the approval process. All those features need to be removed.
The base map needs to be limited to keep it relevant and quick loading. To that end Google provides ways to create custom maps. Likely the most appropriate one for this situation would be Google My Maps. Such maps can be embedded, shared and can be made searchable. A well constructed map and it’s features will show up in search just as well as any feature on the base map.
Thanks - Nick