On Monday 04 May 2020, severin.menard via Tagging wrote: > > With this approach we would need to create a lot of new tags, eg for > highways. Primary, secondary and tertiary are hierarchy based and > does not mean the same reality everywhere, This is why > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway_Tag_Africa has been > created. When you travel, roads, hospitals, schools, bakeries do not > look the same but broadly intend to provide similar services. > "publicly-accessible land worldwide" is the definition in the wiki > for leisure=common and IMO it fits well for defining those kinds of > pieces of lands you cannot miss on imagery and whose status/functions > are not as precise as for parks, recreation grounds, etc.
Note there are real world features which are semantically very similar despite looking very different - imagine a soccer field in central Europe with green grass, one in subtropical Africa with bare ground, one in Greenland with artificial turf and one on a glacier in the Antarctic with compacted snow, all tagged leisure=pitch. But there are also features which at a quick look have semantic similarities (public spaces in this case) but where this smallest common denominator is too broad for it to have much practical meaning and there are tons of features all over the world that fit that definition but for which there are many different existing and more precise tags. We from our European/North American often without thinking try to apply our cultural perspective and classification to environments physically and culturally very different from our own. We currently have almost zero tags with somewhat broader use in the OSM database that were invented outside of Europe and North America (counting Russia as Europe here - the Russian community is relatively active in establishing new tags). That is not normal and indicates a serious inbalance. I think - like often in tagging discussion - that too much focus is put on what tag to use and too little focus on what you actually want to map. And i don't mean what object physically to map on the ground but what semantic aspect of it you want to map. The problem here - and that already became clear with the initial post by Jean-Marc - is that there are a multitude of aspects that define these locations. It would be appropriate to tag these aspects as such and not try to identify a specific combination of characteristics from a type locality and then try to apply this to other locations. That is not very useful, in particular for cultural geography features - no matter if it is a new tag or it it locally re-purposes an existing tag. So my suggestion how to proceed here: * take a good look at the area you want to map things in. * identify what specifically you want to map. * formulate in an abstract form (i.e. not definition via examples) and avoiding weasel words like 'generally' 'typically' or 'usually' the common and verifiable aspects of what you want to map. Such aspects can be physical (in case of areas of land: state of the ground, what kind of objects are located on it etc.) or cultural (like what function the feature has for the locals, how it is used by humans etc.) * look for existing tags that already indicate things you have formulated. Invent new tags when needed. Clarify documentation of existing tags when needed. The third step - formulating your classification in abstract form *before* you assess if existing tags are suitable - is key here. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
