[OSM-newbies] How to use landuse?

[David James]

I'm not sure that I understand landuse tags properly, and newbies seems
like the best list to ask this on first.


Having discovered from a discussion on the talk mailing list that abbuters
isn't being used by the renderers, I decided to start using landuse ...


So, for my home town, using the Yahoo background in Potlatch, coupled with
local knowledge, I can draw an approximate closed outline of the town and
tag it as landuse=residential.

Inside that, of course, there are areas that should be tagged with
different landuses; probably at least: retail, industrial, commercial,
cemetary, recreation_ground.

Can I just overlay smaller areas with these tags on top of the
landuse=residential area? or should I split up the larger residential area
into smaller pieces so that the smaller areas do not overlay the bigger
area? What is the recommended way of doing this?

Then there are also areas where the appropriate tagging comes from the
leisure key (sports_centre, golf_course, pitch, park, and garden to name a
few) or the amenity key (parking, public_building, grave_yard, school,
hospital, town_hall), and probably other keys too.

How should the landuse and leisure/amenity/other keys interact, i.e. if I
have an area that has an appropriate leisure/amenity/etc tag, should there
also be a landuse tag on the same (or a larger area), or should it be
outside any landuse area?

-- 
David James