[OSM-dev] Masts vs Towers yet again (was Re: carto 0.16.0 released)
Oleksiy Muzalyev
oleksiy.muzalyev at bluewin.ch
Fri Apr 15 09:08:23 UTC 2016
On 15.04.2016 10:15, Andy Townsend wrote:
> On 15/04/2016 08:24, Oleksiy Muzalyev wrote:
>>
>> Google search of "radio mast", "radio tower", "television mast",
>> "television tower", etc. gives each millions of results with similar
>> images. It seems that the words "mast" and "tower" are
>> interchangeable. The article in English Wikipedia is called: "Radio
>> masts and towers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_masts_and_towers
>>
>
> At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, the English* word "mast"
> (as in "radio mast") is an adaptation of "mast" as in "the big pointy
> thing on ships that you hang the sails off". It's recent - there have
> only been radio masts for 100 years or so.
>
> There is a sense (noted from an engineering point of view in your
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_masts_and_towers) that a "mast" is
> not self-supporting but that a "tower" is, but there's certainly
> popular crossover usage of the two terms - see for example
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emley_Moor_transmitting_station. I
> drive past that every week, and if asked what it was called would
> probably say "Emley Moor mast" but if asked whether it was a mast or a
> tower would probably say "tower". Also a ship's mast is usually
> self-supporting.
>
> Also, please don't say things like "... and it is not rendered on the
> OSM map at all". What you mean is "not rendered on one of the layers
> on the osm.org site, which is widely used by OSM mappers but hardly at
> all by anyone else". Most people see OSM data either in an app on
> their phone, on a third-party website for e.g. a pizza company, or on
> a board outside the supermarket saying where other local facilities
> are. None of these show what you call "the OSM map".
>
> It'd be nice if OSM could decide what the difference between a mast, a
> tower and a communications tower was and start mapping accordingly.
> The nearest thing to a sane discussion on this was on the OSM Carto
> map style's github rather than somewhere like the tagging list;
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made%3Dmast#First_question:_Is_it_a_mast_or_a_tower.3F
> is positively unhelpful. However it's not the end of the world - if
> people map "big pointy thing" using one of any number of OSM tags then
> most maps using OSM data are free to display "big pointy thing" any
> way they like, if they feel it's appropriate.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Andy
>
> * I'm using British (actually English) English throughout here. Other
> variants are available.
>
>
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Hi Andy,
Thank you for your comment.
I think it is difficult to render man_made=tower with an icon because
there are absolutely different types of towers on the land: Fortified
tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortified_tower , Observation tower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observation_tower , etc.
But sailing ships are not so often placed on the land, so basically
man_made=mast on the land has got less ambiguous meaning. I am trying to
find a logic behind the fact that man_made=mast;tower:type=communication
is rendered with an excellent icon on the default layer of the osm.org
website, and man_made=tower;tower:type=communication is not.
A communication tower (or mast) is not only a "big pointy thing". It has
got also an invisible ever-growing significance, as more and more people
get mobile devices, its electromagnetic emissions, an so on.
Best regards,
Oleksiy
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