> "Otherwise it's just a slope." According to https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/embankment in British English the term embankment is defined as "an artificial slope made of earth and/or stones".
On 5/29/19, Paul Allen <pla16...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, 29 May 2019 at 13:42, Christoph Hormann <o...@imagico.de> wrote: > >> >> man_made=embankment is almost exclusively used for one-sided artificial >> slopes - prominently supported by OSM-Carto rendering it this way. >> > > That surprises me. Not that either man_made or barrier was used for > one-sided artificial slopes but that a one-sided slope is considered an > embankment. > > It's not even clear to me that something counts as an embankment if it is > not > higher than the ground on both sides. Not necessarily the same height > difference > on both sides, but a difference nonetheless. Otherwise it's just a slope. > > barrier=embankment is in the relatively small volume of use mostly used >> for symmetric structures with slopes on both sides. >> > > That may be more an artifact of which tags are used by editor presets for > embankments. I believe iD changed from barrier to man_made fairly > recently. > > The thing is that railway embankments are man-made and their purpose is not > to act as barriers. But fortifications, whilst also being man-made, are > specifically > intended to be barriers. I'm not entirely convinced we should be > deprecating either > tag, but man_made is more generic so if we must restrict ourselves to one > tag > then that is the one. I think we throw away some detail if we restrict > ourselves to > man_made, but we would be deceptive if we tagged railway embankments as > barriers. > > >> And current tagging documentation does not provide a clear suggestion >> how to tag such - if with embankment=yes as a standalone tag or with >> man_made=embankment + embankment=both or embankment=two_sided. >> > > For me this is somewhat similar to the difference between a wall and a > retaining wall. > Retaining walls, by their function, have a significant height difference > between the two > sides. Economics may mean the height difference on one side is so small as > to be > negligible. Ordinary walls have no such difference (or perhaps no more > than a centimetre or > two). To my mind, embankments are two-sided just as non-retaining walls > are. > > Consider a "one-sided embankment." What would things look like if the > embankment had > not been constructed? The drop from high to low shifts position a metre or > two. A different > angle of slope, maybe. Without knowledge that there was an artificial > construct present, > you'd have no way of distinguishing the two situations just from simple > observation. A > retaining wall is distinguishable because of man-made materials, but a > "one-sided > embankment" is not. > > -- > Paul > _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
