What about reorganizing the structure of the wiki to be something like this? Basically any item would fall into three main categories - boundary, landcover or land_use. The boundary or the land_use should be the first layer then the landcover. For instance, within a park you could have trees, rocks, sands etc. The natural category can be combined into one category for the landcover. The items for amenity, historic, leisure, man_made, military, shop and tourism would fall under the land_use category even though they wouldn't be tagged land_use=amenity, etc. They could still be tagged the same way as currently they are.
I like the idea of having one tag for any type of trees. There could be a subtype such as type=forest or type=eucalyptus_grove, type=deciduouis, etc. The trees could even be rendered differently depending on how much space they took up. Nature_reserve should only be for a natural boundary that is an official nature reserve. Nature_reserve should also be either transparent or in the background. There are cases where it will run over both land and water. It may even run over a coast line like it does in Point Lobos, Ca. Especially in the Bay Area in California, there are a lot of tags that overlap each other and as a result look ugly. Using something like landcover=trees may help. The trees could be rendered with little tree icons instead of just being a solid shade of green like the parks are. One tag Natural=Trees, maybe it could be rendered differently based on the size. Boundary = the official boundary set by a government or municipality = administrative = civil = nature_reserve = national_park = national_forest = park = political landcover = is the physical material at the surface of the earth. = basin = bay = beach = cave_entrance = cave = rock face = coastline = fell = glacier = grass = heath = land = marsh = meadow = mud = peak = rocks = scree = scrub = snow = spring = tree (s) = volcano = water = wetland Land_use is the human modification of natural environment or wilderness into built environment such as fields, pastures, and settlements = allotments = cemetery = farm = farmyard = landfill = logging = open_space = pasture = quarry = railway = recreation_ground = reservoir = salt_pond = village_green = vineyard = brownfield = commercial = construction = greenfield = industrial = residential = retail amenity historic leisure man_made military shop tourism \============== /// //Tom: I'd really like to nominate someone like Nick Whitelegg as Countryside Tsar for a day, so he could work out the different basic features we need to know about in the countryside and an appropriate tagging schema. Then, as always, a combination of wiki documentation, Mapnik & ti...@home rules, Xybot mischief and peer education could disseminate this sensible approach. I'm going to go back to this because it makes so much sense to do. I too get discouraged by the lack of comprehensible tags. I actually think that "natural" key is a bad key. Is an artificial lake a natural=water or something else? If it's a reservoir (and what lake isn't technically a reservoir) is it sufficient to tag it just landuse=reservoir, and should we tag it as man_made=water to explain that it's not actually natural? No, clearly we shouldn't. So we could just accept that natural and landuse are equivalent and adjust natural tagging as such (since changing everything to landuse seems out of the question). So if we do that, then natural=wood wood=managed or landuse=forestry or whatever becomes a reasonable way to separate the landform from the land use Greg: So, I think we need some tags that denote landcover, and some tags that denote legal status. so an area would have at most 1, preferably exactly one of: landcover=trees landcover=swamp .... Exactly what I was thinking (though I think just using natural as equivalent to landcover might be the way to go at this point), and using the USGS style landuse values [1] would be a good start covering the majority of cases (I think just rolling them all into natural (including man made surfaces makes sense at this point, but I accept I may be--and probably am--wrong) and at most 1 of land_use=... eh... I'm less fond of this, just because I'm not sold on there being 1 and only 1 land use for an area but I have no supporting evidence to back up my iffy feeling yes, land_use=forestry perhaps implies land_cover=trees, but in the case of land_use=conservation I would expect a variety of landcover tags within the administrative boundary of the conservation area/park. As would I, when I said solid fill earlier I mean more like hatching or even a transparent overlay/underlay? for rendering, I'm pretty convinced about it being a boundary=whatever issue at this point for things like parks/national forests,DNR land, BLM land... but not convinced that something can't be both say land_use=recreation and land_use=conservation (you can bike, and paddle and fish, but you cant motor and litter and club baby seals) Gustav: Because is see forests as something fundamentally different from a few trees in the corner of a park. But would you classify them as a different landcover than say natural=wood, wood=sparse or something. A 500 m^2 wooded area--rendering as forests do elsewhere--inside a park is probably going to look like "hey look theres a spot with trees" as opposed to "what is a tiny wilderness doing inside the city park?" [1] http://gisdata.usgs.gov/edc_catalog/fetch_layer_docs.php?LayerName=NLCD%2020 01%20Land%20Cover Anyway, I think it's all a cluster, I just thought I could pipe in to add to the fun. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
