[Tagging] football or soccer ?

[Liz]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2010, Richard Welty wrote:

> as a practical matter (mapping football fields), there are only two
> relevant ones
> in the North America: outdoor fields of 100 yards in length (US college
> & pro
> games, outdoors), and outdoor fields of 110 yards in length (Canadian). and
> i see no compelling reason why we really need to distinguish between the
> two.
> in reviewing the 9/8/6 man football pages, i don't see much need to
> distinguish
> those either. maybe length/width tags indicating the size of the field,
> but no
> more than that. some (many?) of these fields get used for both north
> american
> football and soccer (no insult to UK football fans intended.)
> 
> thinking on it, the potential maxlength and maxwidth values are probably
> interesting, as they indicate what games might be played on the surface.
> if it's big enough for both american football and soccer, then the only
> real differences are the lines on the field and nature of the goal.
> 
> the arena variants are all played in large indoor multipurpose arenas, and
> thus probably don't deserve to be specifically tagged. the floor used for
> Arena football one night may be used for basketball, hockey, the circus,
> and ice show or a rock show on another night.
> 
> the other variants, touch, flag, etc., are all pickup games that can get
> played on any grassy field. no tagging here.
> 
> richard
> 

you are describing problems with the tagging system, in that I can't mark the 
area as multiuse eg australian rules in winter and cricket in summer 
that combination is actually very common in Australia

In my town
however touch is played on a particular ground, shared time wise in winter 
with hockey.
Junior soccer has its own ground
Senior soccer has its own grounds
Rugby Union has its own ground
Rugby League has some grounds of its own, and some shared (Saturday one sport, 
Sunday the other)
and so on

I don't have a problem with marking what sports are played where. I don't have 
a complaint about being accurate with tagging, but sometimes I have to prefer 
one use of an area over another, because we cannot parallel tag with this API.

Considering the use for the data
If I travel to Town X and use my Garmin machine with OSM map, can I find the 
cricket oval in time for the match?
Will the search allow me to identify the correct destination, or will I have a 
choice of places which I have to check to see the correct game being played?