I wish to broadly discuss the definition of fountains and similar
objects that have the objective of delivering water (drinkable or not).
Everything I wish to discuss in this thread is about man made
constructions that transport water through pipes, I will thus not talk
about wells and such things.
This is not a proposal, since I first wish to identify the main problems
with what I’m going to suggest.
The final objective is the deprecation of man_made=water_tap in order to
unify all these features under the same tag.
Background
The tags pertaining to this category are quite a disorganized mess with
a lot of overlaps.
The main tag used to indicate a place where drinking water is available
is amenity=drinking_water. This is a very affirmed tag and works very
well, because it provides indications as to where it is possible to find
water for drinking. It is thus immediately useful to the users of the
map and it doesn’t require mappers to go through 5 different tags to
indicate that.
The second most used tag in this category amenity=fountain, this
describes a man made object that provides a flow of water. The flow of
water can be continuous or it can be stopped by a person. The fountain
can be decorative or it may provide some service (such as providing
drinking water). It is unclear whether the majority of the tagged
features are decorative fountains or not, the wiki appears to suggest so
but in many countries there is no distinction among the word for a
decorative fountain and a service one.
The third relevant tag is man_made=water_tap; this indicates any man
made construction that provides water (drinkable or not) through a tap,
thus the flow of the water can be started and stopped by a person.
The last relevant tag is man_made=drinking_fountain, this tag has very
few usages and a thread about its deprecation has already been started,
thus I will not discuss about it in detail.
Popularity of these tags:
1.
amenity=drinking_water: 266,535
2.
amenity=fountain: 151,218
3.
man_made=water_tap: 23,678
4.
man_made=drinking_fountain: 656
Problems with the current tagging scheme
The current tagging scheme works very well to tag places where people
can find water to drink. This is great since this information is very
useful to map users.
However, it often fails at describing how the water is delivered or what
is delivering it. amenity=drinking_water is a great generic tag that
works perfectly for this, however more specialized tags should allow to
distinguish different features that are delivering the water.
This is the objective of man_made=water_tap and amenity=fountain. These
provide a description of the object that delivers the water. Moreover,
these tags can be used to describe both systems that deliver drinking
water or systems that deliver non potable water. This is done mainly by
adding the secondary tag drinking_water=*, even though in many cases
man_made=water_tap coexists with amenity=drinking_water.
amenity=fountain has a subtag fountain=* used to describe the type of
fountain. This subtag is not widely used, but it contains several
different values:
*
splash_pad: 1458
*
decorative: 950
*
nozzle: 885
*
bubbler: 319
*
drinking: 266
Among other values describing the specific name of the type of fountains
(nasone fountains for example are a style of fountains used to provide
drinking water in Rome).
Thus, currently the tag amenity=fountain is used both to describe
decorative fountains and to describe fountains that provide drinking
water or simple generic nozzles.
The tag fountain=* is not well defined since it can describe both the
use of the fountain (fountain=drinking) and the particular style of the
fountain (fountain=nasone).
The biggest issue with this is the overlap of the two tags
amenity=fountain and man_made=water_tap. If amenity=fountain was used to
only describe large decorative fountains, which cannot supposedly be
switched off by a common person this wouldn’t be a problem. However,
since this feature can represent nozzles and drinking fountains, some of
the fountains here represented can have a water tap.
Thus the same feature might be tagged either as man_made=water_tap or
amenity=fountain. The tag amenity=fountain has no way to specify that
the water flow can be started or stopped through a tap.
Out of these two tags, the most problematic appears to be
man_made=water_tap, since it describes any generic object that has a
tap. That could be anything, thus this tag doesn’t really provide
insightful information about what it is describing, it just provides one
of its properties.
How could this be solved?
I believe that the best course of action is the deprecation of
man_made=water_tap. This tag is redundant and not descriptive.
However, the problem with its deprecation is finding a valid alternative
to it. It would make sense to transform it into a secondary value of
amenity=fountain, such as tap=yes.
However, there is no shared consensus that amenity=fountain should
actually be used to describe non decorative fountains.
I believe there are two courses of action that might be taken, according
to how the community feels about it.
The first of the two, the one I would personally prefer, is defining
amenity=fountain as any man made structure that provides water through
pipes and is not a sink. This would require a better definition of the
subtag fountain=* and the definition of some sensible values it can
assume by deprecating the several current ones; since this tag is not
widely used this shouldn’t be a problem.
The second alternative would be the creation of a new tag used to
describe non decorative fountains in order to separate these from
amenity=fountain. This new tag would have a subtag similar to fountain=*
to specify the use of the fountain.
Features to describe
However we decide to proceed, I feel that there are some particular
properties of this entity that should easily be describable.
*
Does it provide drinking water? (through drinking_water=*)
*
Can the flow of water be stopped through a tap? (New subtag tap=yes)
*
What is the specific use of this fountain? (provide drinking water,
provide water for irrigation, water for cleaning, water for animals…)
*
What is the style of this fountain (nasone…)
Another issue that arose was the differentiation of “bubblers” from
other fountains providing drinking water.
The main difference among the two is the direction of the jet of water,
thus a tag describing such property might be desirable.
Among other things that this could fix is a better description of
amenity=watering_place, by providing information about whether it is man
made or naturally occurring.
I’ll wait some comments about this whole ordeal so that we can decide
whether it actually makes sense to apport these modifications to the
tagging scheme and what the amenity=fountain tag should describe. The
main thing I want to push forward for now is the deprecation of
man_made=water_tap in favour of a more descriptive tag yet to be
completely defined.
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