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<p>I wish
to broadly discuss the definition of fountains and similar objects
that have the objective of delivering water (drinkable or not).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This is not a proposal, since I first wish to identify the main
problems with what I’m going to suggest.</p>
<p>The final objective is the deprecation of man_made=water_tap in
order to unify all these features under the same tag.</p>
<p><br>
<br>
</p>
<h1 class="western">Background</h1>
<p>The tags pertaining to this category are quite a disorganized
mess
with a lot of overlaps.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><br>
<br>
</p>
<p>Popularity of these tags:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>amenity=drinking_water: 266,535</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>amenity=fountain: 151,218</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>man_made=water_tap: 23,678</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>man_made=drinking_fountain: 656</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p><br>
<br>
</p>
<h1 class="western">Problems with the current tagging scheme</h1>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><br>
<br>
</p>
<p>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:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>splash_pad: 1458</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>decorative: 950</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>nozzle: 885</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>bubbler: 319</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>drinking: 266</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p><br>
<br>
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h1 class="western">How could this be solved?</h1>
<p>I believe that the best course of action is the deprecation of
man_made=water_tap. This tag is redundant and not descriptive.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>However, there is no shared consensus that amenity=fountain
should
actually be used to describe non decorative fountains.</p>
<p><br>
<br>
</p>
<p>I believe there are two courses of action that might be taken,
according to how the community feels about it.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><br>
<br>
</p>
<h1 class="western">Features to describe</h1>
<p>However we decide to proceed, I feel that there are some
particular properties of this entity that should easily be
describable.</p>
<p><br>
<br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Does it provide drinking water? (through drinking_water=*)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Can the flow of water be stopped through a tap? (New subtag
tap=yes)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>What is the specific use of this fountain? (provide drinking
water, provide water for irrigation, water for cleaning, water
for animals…)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>What is the style of this fountain (nasone…)</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><br>
<br>
</p>
<p>Another issue that arose was the differentiation of “bubblers”
from other fountains providing drinking water.</p>
<p>The main difference among the two is the direction of the jet of
water, thus a tag describing such property might be desirable.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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