[Tagging] Removal of "amenity" from OSM tagging

[Daniel Koć]

W dniu 28.05.2015 11:22, AYTOUN RALPH napisał(a):
> And with this argument for a hierarchical approach we are back to the
> start point of umbrella tags that cover all possibilities which is
> 
> landuse=educational as a polygon encompassing the whole area and the
> whole range of educational facilities.
> 
> using landuse=school excludes universities, colleges, etc  and you
> would then need other tags landuse=university and landuse=college,
> which then makes the landuse tagging specific instead of general.

We have also landuse/landcover dispute ("landuse=grass" should be rather 
landcover=grass or landuse=meadow probably), so "landuse" is not really 
general - I would see it as the object category "tree":

area
   water
      ...
   land
      building
         ...
      landuse
         educational
            kindergarten
            school (- like "primary school")
            higher/further education (- in Poland HE/FE classification is 
not used or known, we have only "higher schools")
               university
               college
         ...
      landcover
         grass
         sand
         trees
         ...

We could simply extend the current system of compulsive categorization 
with such schema, but I think we can do much better and avoid future 
problems by taking this responsibility from the mappers and letting them 
focus on the ground truth rather than requiring them to do some 
philosophical work with categories.

We should care for ontology outside the tagging, because it belongs to 
meta- level. Using Wikidata as a helper would be rich and established 
source for qualifying and relations between objects and categories.

This would also give us more flexibility, because with compulsive 
categories we're not sure if the mapper is sure that this is the right 
category or is just following convention from Wiki. We could also expand 
it much easier with new categories when needed.

> If we look at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:landuse [1] the
> first sentence is correct "Mainly used for describe the PRIMARY USE of
> land by humans."

But we may be not aware of the status. Forest is a great example - in 
many cases we just see the trees and don't know if they are "used" or 
not, but we're pushed to choose if it's natural=wood or landuse=forest, 
because there is no established area/land=trees tagging. And what about 
trees in the park - they're not a forest, but still we can say they're 
"used" and taken care of by man.

I would prefer something really general, like for example:

area=trees/land=trees/landcover=trees
forest=mixed
school=primary/yes (if we don't know the type)

and let the category tree be curated in our Wikidata instance (or 
anything we consider suitable for this task).

> so the hierarchical approach should then be something like
> landuse=agriculture... agriculture would then be sub categorised with
> farmland (worked land for crops), orchard (trees planted for their
> fruits), vineyard, pasture, etc.
> landuse=residential (could be divided into urban and rural which have
> totally different infrastructures)
> landuse=commercial
> landuse=industrial
> landuse=educational
> landuse=civic
> landuse=transport
> instead of the myriad of specifics that we now have like
> landuse=peat_cutting and landuse=salt_pond....these are all sub
> categories of the primary use of the land.

And the area of a driving school or a private higher school may be just:

area=driving_school
area=school + school=higher + owner=private

because it's at the same time commercial AND educational in many cases.

It's just a sketch (what about public commercial entities? and so on), 
but the less compulsive categorization in tagging, the better.

-- 
"The train is always on time / The trick is to be ready to put your bags 
down" [A. Cohen]