[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Substation Refinement

[Ole Nielsen]

On 01/09/2013 19:04, François Lacombe wrote:
> 2013/8/30 Ole Nielsen <on-osm at xs4all.nl <mailto:on-osm at xs4all.nl>>
>
>     Agree, the transformer is just a feature of the pole. I wouldn't tag
>     it as a substation.
>
>     According to
>     http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/__wiki/Proposed_features/__Substation_refinement
>     <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Substation_refinement>
>     that is indeed how to do it. I see no problems in having an
>     alternative tagging of the transformer since the power key is
>     already used for the pole. For retrieval it is only slightly more
>     complicated than just searching for power=transformer.
>
>
> It's already used for the poles but don't you think it's transformers
> which deserve the most the usage of power=* ?

In this case no.
 From an electrical viewpoint the transformer is of course important. 
However, is this the most important aspect for the average user? You see 
a pole in a row of poles and this particular one happens to have some 
kind of lump attached to the top. It may be useful to tag this fact for 
navigational purposes but it is otherwise of doubtful use. Very few 
users will be interested in the details of that transformer or its 
connections to the grid. Even when I'm interested in power grids myself 
I don't find the lower voltage distribution grids particularly 
interesting. Furthermore, it is mostly impossible to map the 
distribution networks to any degree of completeness due to 
undergrounding etc. Thus I can't see much need to develop an elaborate 
tagging for this reason especially if it is not compatible with the 
existing tagging practice. However, the average mapper may still want to 
tag the transformer as an interesting feature of the pole. An additional 
attribute tag (transformer=yes/*) will be sufficient for that and it 
won't break anything. Data consumers can easily extract this information 
if they need to.

Ole