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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 7/10/22 23:37, Davidoskky via
Tagging wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:05b5ddd8-c435-d133-2ee6-170cb65f95d7@yahoo.it">
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<p> </p>
<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>
</blockquote>
The original intention was to tag decorative fountains. <br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:05b5ddd8-c435-d133-2ee6-170cb65f95d7@yahoo.it">
<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>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>I would never describe a tap as a fountain. Just me? <br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:05b5ddd8-c435-d133-2ee6-170cb65f95d7@yahoo.it">
<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>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>I would never describe a 'drinking fountain' as a decorative
fountain. Just me? </p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:05b5ddd8-c435-d133-2ee6-170cb65f95d7@yahoo.it">
<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>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>The tag amenity=drinking_water fails to tag non drinking water...
<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:05b5ddd8-c435-d133-2ee6-170cb65f95d7@yahoo.it">
<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>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>The combination of man_made=water_tap coexists with
amenity=drinking_water was done for the render! It serves no other
function and amenity=drinking_water could be removed and yet
retain the essential information. <br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:05b5ddd8-c435-d133-2ee6-170cb65f95d7@yahoo.it">
<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>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>Fountain also does not define a tap... <br>
</p>
<p>How would you better define a water tap? <br>
</p>
<p>A water outlet with water flow controlled by an operator
controlled valve? The outlet maybe plain or provide a coupling
mechanism such as a thread to attachment to other thing like a
hose. ???? <br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:05b5ddd8-c435-d133-2ee6-170cb65f95d7@yahoo.it">
<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>
</p>
</blockquote>
amenity=water_outlet? <br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:05b5ddd8-c435-d133-2ee6-170cb65f95d7@yahoo.it">
<p> <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>
</ul>
</blockquote>
Keep - already exists.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:05b5ddd8-c435-d133-2ee6-170cb65f95d7@yahoo.it">
<ul>
<li> <br>
</li>
<li>
<p>Can the flow of water be stopped through a tap? (New subtag
tap=yes)</p>
</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
definition? The major criticism of man_made=water_tap is it's
definition... so there would be the same need to define tap here.. <br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:05b5ddd8-c435-d133-2ee6-170cb65f95d7@yahoo.it">
<ul>
<li> <br>
</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>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>Hose hold garden taps are used for lots of purposes... no need to
define this .. another rabbit hole.<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:05b5ddd8-c435-d133-2ee6-170cb65f95d7@yahoo.it">
<ul>
<li> <br>
</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>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>I have mentioned is another thread something along the lines of <br>
</p>
<p>water_direction=upwards_arc/down/up/horizontal/decorative_spray/*
???<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:05b5ddd8-c435-d133-2ee6-170cb65f95d7@yahoo.it">
<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>
<p>
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</blockquote>
<br>
<p>What is a more descriptive tag for a 'water tap'? These words are
in common use in Britain .. and that is what OSM is supposed to
use. <br>
</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_(valve)">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_(valve)</a><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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