[Tagging] on the name of a tag for landcover

[Johan Jönsson]

LM_1 <flukas.robot+osm at ...> writes:
> 
> What about this:
> Let's have fully qualified hierarchical names, something like
> landcover=vegetation:herbaceous:grass, 
...

> Mappers would understandably not be willing to do it all, therefore
> any generic qualifications could be omited if the rest is unambiguous.
...
> 
Sounds like a great way.

There are of course several ways to construct hierarchy,
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) uses one such 
approach and when they come sufficently deep they switch to a more complicated 
system with tailored classifiers and attributes to go further.

Right below the hierarchical system for vegetated land, FAO begin the 
classification by  using the overall appearance of the vegetation to 
categorize landcover.

They use something they call lifeforms where they identify "woody" plants as 
distinguished from "herbacious" plants. The "woody" plants are subdivided 
into "trees" and "shrubs" following the simple rule:
If higher than 5 metres then it is a tree.

They then identify if the land has a cover of trees/shrubs or if it is 
herbaceous. This is supposed to be a complete set of possibilities.

-So on some level in the hierarchy we could (if we want) use theses three 
values as the only ones. That is why I am thinking on what names these three 
should have. For the moment the names of the three values are:  
trees/shrubs(?)/grass 
Defined as: 
"Trees" are woody plants over 5 m
"Shrubs" are woody plants below 5 m
"Grass" are not woody plants

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_plant