[Tagging] landuse:illegal and illegal:yes/no

[Steve Bennett]

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 10:00 PM, grin <grin at grin.hu> wrote:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/illegal

I see a few serious issues with this scheme:

1) "illegal" is not really a category of things. It's an attribute,
and its meaning varies - here it seems to primarily convey a sense of
"informal". For example, in most places, dumping rubbish *anywhere* is
"illegal". An "illegal rubbish dump" is really just an informal
rubbish dump - and it's as illegal as anywhere else. Similarly for
cemetery - this really describes an "informal cemetery". The legality
is not really of major interest to users of the map. They just want to
distinguish between an official cemetery and something else.

2) landuse=illegal just seems broken. "This land is used for illegality"?

3) If your primary use case is environmental damage, it would better
to focus around that. "hazard=domestic_waste" would be much more to
the point, and could be used without having to find out whether the
rubbish is actually "illegal" or not. If rubbish regularly accumulates
on the side of a river, it's probably not "illegal" as such, but is
the same kind of environmental problem.

So, for the tags you suggest, I propose alternatives:

illegal=waste_disposal -> landuse=refuse (or whatever it is), informal=yes
illegal=squatted_property -> landuse=residential, owner=squatters
illegal=graveyard -> landuse=graveyard, informal=yes
illegal=barrier -> barrier=fence, informal=yes
illegal=deforestation -> landuse=farmyard, informal=yes

I think the tags you've proposed focus on one single attribute, and
won't gel at all well with other tags and map elements.

Steve