On Friday 24 July 2020, Michael Montani wrote: > > The voting for natural=bare_soil has begun and can be found > here<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Ground#Vot >ing>. It will temptatively close August 7th, given enough support.
It is unfortunate that the suggestion to not aim for introducing an umbrella tag was not taken into account. The proposal as is lacks clarity of what it actually suggests and how this new tag delienates against existing tags. It also lacks comprehensive practical guidance for the mapper how to identify and delineate features with this tag based on real world on-the-ground examples. What you essentially attempt to introduce here is a *residual* tag to turn the open OSM tagging system consisting of tags that positively identify specific real world features into a closed land cover classification system modeled after countless such systems (some of which you cited). In OSM we generally think that using an open tagging system where the tags are narrowly defined in what the positively mean in a locally verifiable fashion is better for representing the global geography in all its diversity and to document local knowledge of people than a closed classification system that assigns the class with the lowest mismatch in a classification developed from a specific culturally narrow perspective to every point of the earth surface. Side note: Measuring percentage of ground cover in an arid/semiarid context is usually not practically verifiable on the ground, in particular in areas with strong seasonality. Examples: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Somewhere_in_Kazakhstan_(20160402_072251_1PS)_(28754128301).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lake_turkana.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Landschaft_AnysbergPICT1454.JPG We definitely do not want such areas to be engrossed in some generic 'unvegetated or sparsely vegetated area' classification. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
