[Tagging] Open of discussion on "operational_status" (part of life cycle with disused/abandoned/demolished)

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 06/29/13 07:37, Bryce Nesbitt wrote:
> This is a proposal to fill a hole in the life cycle concepts (that of
> facilities /intended/ to be operational):
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Tag:operational_status
> I have drawn from the HOT tagging, and from the experience mapping
> drinking fountain status with wetap:status

I have no strong opinion on the general idea but one thing sticks out: 
"operational_status=operating".

Obviously, this should be the default assumption. If there's a toilet 
mapped then I assume that it is working.

I understand how you'd like mappers to reaffirm that it is *indeed* 
working by setting "operational_status=operating", but this takes you 
way into the terrain of "verification mapping" which is a larger topic - 
what you're suggesting really only makes sense if one can assume that a 
mapper passing by a working toilet would make sure it is tagged 
operational_status=operating and then update the operational_status:date 
to the current date. (If you do not expect this behaviour then you 
wouldn't need operational_status:date because it would simply be the 
date when the tag has been last changed.)

This leads to a situation where a mapper is expected to, as he or she 
walks the streets, update every object in the database with "yep, this 
is still there, I walked past it right now". Because just as a toilet 
could fall into disrepair, a shop could close or a house vanish, and 
what we currently do is we map this when we see it but we don't map "yep 
the house was still there last Sunday". Attempting to do this would 
change the typical mapper workflow and the structure of our data 
drastically.

I know it's a slippery slope argument, and you're only proposing to do 
this for a narrow subset of things - I just wanted to point out that 
"verification mapping" is not something we do currently.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"