[Tagging] on the name of a tag for landcover

[Ilpo Järvinen]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2012, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:

> 2012/8/15 David ``Smith'' <vidthekid at gmail.com>:
> > I thought we used natural=* for this kind of thing.
> 
> 
> "natural" is not defined in a clear way IMHO, it is a mixture of
> different kind of features, but most of them could be called
> "geographical features" and if this was expressed clearly it would
> introduce some logics that can also help develop new tags for things
> for which currently there is no tag in general use.
> 
> Please have a look at the main natural page to review the list of
> current features:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:natural
> 
> IMHO all those would qualify for "geographical feature":
> arete
> beach
> bay
> cave_entrance
> cliff
> coastline
> fell
> glacier
> heath
> peak
> ridge
> saddle
> scrub
> spring
> tree_row
> volcano
> wetland
> 
> 
> maybe also
> stone
> tree
> wood
> grassland
> 
> while these are not geographical features in this sense:
> water
> scree
> sand
> mud
> 
> 
> > For the different broad classes of vegetation discussed so far in this
> > thread, there's natural=grass/scrub/wood.  Of course there's natural=water.
> > Other landcover types are uncommon in central Ohio so I'm not familiar with
> > their tagging, but I thought we had natural= values for things like sand,
> > bare rock, swamp, glacier, etc...
> 
> 
> how can "sand" or bare_rock be in the same category as swamp and
> glacier? The latter would be mud or ice if we were using the same kind
> of categorisation IMHO.

IMHO your picks are totally arbitary, I fail to see any logic behind what 
you consider geographical feature and what not? 

I think that ruling "sand" and "bare_rock" out is because languages 
(might?) lack a word to describe it with a "better" word that wouldn't 
mention the surface itself. Therefore such geographical features are 
referred using the particular surface.

I suspect that ruling water out is because it's not called "lake" or 
so in osm key string?


-- 
 i.