[Tagging] preproposal : internet webcam

Egil Hjelmeland privat at egil-hjelmeland.no
Thu Nov 28 22:08:50 UTC 2013


On 28. nov. 2013 20:07, Dan S wrote:
> 2013/11/28 Egil Hjelmeland <privat at egil-hjelmeland.no>:
>> I have to my surprise not been able to find any established practice for
>> tagging webcams on internet. I am thinking of cameras that display a place,
>> so you can click in to see the weather, snow conditions and such. As a
>> service to the public, not to Big Brother. So I feel man_made=surveillance
>> is wrong. Also I suspect most surveillance cameras are not public on
>> internet.
> I would like to (politely :) disagree with your split.
> man_made=surveillance seems to be perfect IMHO. The word
> "surveillance" may feel big-brotherish, but it is literally what a
> webcam does. It seems to me you could come up with some nice tags to
> add to the surveillance scheme, such as webcam=public
>
> Best
> Dan
>
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Considering that mountain paths are tagged as "highway", I feel the 
pieces fall into place now ;-)

I still do not think man_made=surveillance is perfect. But I do not have 
huge problems with it as long as it is documented.

But if I kindly refer you to 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made%3Dsurveillance , you 
will see that it talk about Big Brother, not about webcams. It does not 
even define how to link to a image on internet. 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Extended_tags_for_Key:Surveillance 
also focuses on surveillance. I just looked at 
http://osmcamera.tk/tags.php . Out of 21996 man_made=surveillance in the 
world, there are just 362 url= and 370 website=. Many of the website= 
and a few of the url= are just links to the operators of Big Brother 
non-webcams. After some random sampling, it seem to me that the majority 
of actual webcams are what I would call surveillance cameras.

So when only a few hundred webcams displaying landscape are mapped in 
the world, I would say there is a real problem that people do not know 
how to map them.

Regaring the multiple cameras on the same spot problem, I just got an 
idea; Make each camera as a relation, the only member is the location node.

-- Egil




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