> On May 10, 2016, at 11:24 AM, Charlotte Wolter <techl...@techlady.com> wrote: > Steve, I see your argument. You're going for consistency, which is usually a > good thing. > But, what if the land "cover" is scattered trees that are the size of > large shrubs in a desert environment? I'm thinking of the chaparral of > Southern California, the Joshua Tree forests in the Mohave desert and the > Saguaro forests of southern Arizona. They would meet a biologist's definition > of "forest.”
I AM going for consistency, even as I know it to be sometimes ridiculed as the foolish hobgoblin of small minds. However, consistency is an absolute necessity in a project as wide as OSM, with its millions of contributors, huge number of wiki pages offering helpful tagging instructions and shred of hope for sanity going forward. Your examples are excellent edge cases of “well, what do we do HERE?” OSM does cause us to examine those sorts of things from time to time, and I’m very glad that it does and I’m very glad that OSM has discussions like this, talk pages, wikis, voting, and especially, free-form tagging. All of these allow us to evolve into something better, and not only have we done that, we will continue to do so. It is fascinating to consider a scrub desert or a large area where huge cacti are a dominant plant species and ask myself (ourselves): is this a forest? What IS this? These are awesome questions and I do not have an immediate answer. I am very glad you ask them. > Part of the problem is a concept of "forest" and "land cover" based > on the East Coast and Europe. I know you're a Californian, so you must see > the difference. I do. OSM tagging really must evolve to cover our entire planet Earth. OK, sure, we started in Europe, but we are quite the worldwide project now. Let our tagging catch up to that, as it must. > I do like the idea of using boundary=protected_area. As I said, it “came to the rescue” and good, thoughtful tagging with well-established semantics can and will do exactly this again in the future. Yes! > By the way, I wonder about the writer below who said the city of Reno > is within the national forest. Surrounded by it, maybe, like Flagstaff, Ariz. > (Coconino NF), but I guarantee it's not actually part of the federal forest. > Maybe we need to get more accurate boundaries. Yeah, me, too. I didn’t look at those specific examples in OSM, but your characterizations are correct and it may be that OSM needs much better tagging if it is asserted that large cities are found WITHIN the boundaries of US National Forests: I strongly believe they are not, regardless of whether OSM tags them that way. Do we have errors in our map? Yes. Can and do we correct them? Yes, we do. OSM simply continues to get better and better. Partly due to discussions like these. SteveA California _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
