[Tagging] Religious landuse

[Tom Pfeifer]

Pieren wrote, on 2014-08-26 18:07:
> On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 5:25 PM, Tom Pfeifer <t.pfeifer at computer.org> wrote:
>
>> Thus the comparison with [amenity=school], that can be easily expanded to
>> the
>> whole campus, fails for [amenity=place_of_worship].
[...]
> I'm not following you here. Active or not doesn't change the fact that
> now we have two different ways for tagging an amenity and its
> surrounding area when we compare with "school", "hospital",
> "university" or wahteveramenityyoulike. We don't need a
> "landuse=school" because the amenity=school is already covering the
> area, not the individual buildings.

Agreed, however the act of schooling is performed on the whole campus,
as the children run around the physical exercise site around the building.
Similarly, nearly all buildings on the hospital campus are used for
clinical treatments.

> We have to follow the same logic for all features.

As long as it works. As you see life is not that easily structured
into simple categories.

> The problem is that amenity=place_of_worship
> rendering is for a building on the main map style. This could be fixed
> by using a different style/colour/transparency if the tag
> "amenity=place_of_worship" is combined or not with a tag "building=*".

Rendering was just mentioned for illustrating the current perspective, of course
that can be adjusted if needed.

If you keep recommending to tag the church with "amenity=place_of_worship"
then you should not use the same tag for the campus around. You would end with
an amenity within an amenity, with the same value.

Secondly, you would give the whole area a description of an activity that
is not performed there. People are not worshipping under the (free standing)
bell tower, or the group of trees next to the graveyard, they do in the
church/mosque/temple.

Thus "amenity=place_of_worship" is perfectly tailored to this particular
building and its meaning should not be expanded to something it was not
defined for initially. Keep in mind it is already used 611000 times, only
1/3 of them has a building tag, but quite certainly 90% of them are buildings.

If you want to expand the meaning of this tag you would need a migration strategy,
but I don't see it necessary. "landuse=religious" is consistent with "commercial"
or "retail", where you can have different retail amenities or businesses on
the area. OSM tagging is not perfect, but we do not introduce a new inconsistency
with this tag.