[Tagging] Key "location" (was "Feature Proposal - Voting - entrance=*")

John Sturdy jcg.sturdy at gmail.com
Fri Oct 14 16:17:36 BST 2011


On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 3:53 PM, Pieren <pieren3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/10/14 Kytömaa Lauri <lauri.kytomaa at aalto.fi>:
>> Taginfo won't show the combinations at the moment, but location=*
>> is, afaik, used on ways with man_made=pipeline and nodes tagged
>> amenity/emergency=fire_hydrant.
>
> Yes but the proposal is now to extend its usage to everything under
> ground. To be honest, I'm not aware about pipelines and fire hydants
> tagging but I'm concerned if I discover a tag "location=*" in many OSM
> objects like buildings, shops or e.g. telephones just because they are
> underground.

I don't think the word "location" is very good, but then it wouldn't
be the only tag key in use that seems a bit clumsy; I guess tagging is
just far enough away from normal use of natural language words that
we'll have to put up with that.  (I would have chosen the word "level"
for this use, and that is not documented as being used, but is it
worth trying to change to use it?)

I think it makes sense to have one tag that indicates that something
is underground, for any type of thing.  That means that software (e.g.
renderers) can do a simple test for it, and that mappers only need to
know one tag for it.  And I prefer "location=underground" over
"underground=yes" because we could also use "location=overground", and
thus still only have to do one check in software to know that
something's not at ground level.

__John



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