[Tagging] Gated communities - access=private or destination?

Greg Troxel gdt at ir.bbn.com
Sun Apr 15 15:01:52 BST 2012


Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com> writes:

> On the other hand, private says "Only with permission of the owner on
> an individual basis". But the owner is the homeowners association, and
> the individual residents can allow people in.

That's creating nits where they don't even exist!  Owner is a more
complicated concept (and for this discussion would include a person
leasing a single-family house).

I think the key issue with "legitimate reason" is that it's tied to
thinking about rights of access.  With an entirely private place, only
owners have a right of access (ignoring utility easements), and everyone
else is there by permission.

> In addition, the example for destination - "customer parking lots" -
> has the same problems as a gated community. You (usually) can't park
> there to sleep in your car or have a tailgate party.

True, but that raises the larger question we keep avoiding: are we
building an ontology to represent the entire world?

My impression is that access=destination is a slightly damaged version
of access=yes.  The road is a public way, but use for other than going
within the complex/etc. is specially prohibited.

It seems those lots are tagged access=customers.  That's an expanded
version of access=private, to note that customers of nearby stores have
permission.

These two uses are fundamentally different (public- vs private+).

access=private/permissive/destination/yes is currently more or less
based on concepts in English law.   I think what you're trying to do
(and I understand why and think it's reasonable) is to have a way to
define the set of people

> How would you distinguish an entry for visitors from an entry for
> residents only?

That's reasonable, but these are subtypes of access=private.
perhaps

 private=residents
 private=guests

I think it's helpful to articulate what the data consumers are going to
do, and what decisions they need to make, which leads to working on the
grand ontology (which is what I was doing above).
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20120415/e5f4f958/attachment.pgp>


More information about the Tagging mailing list