[Tagging] Mapping leats

[Christoph Hormann]

On Friday 21 April 2017, John Sturdy wrote:
>
> A leat is to take the water to a specific place, with the emphasis
> more on the destination than on where it's getting the water from,
> and as it's for a water supply, the water in it will generally be
> reasonably clean (or at least not as muddy as ditch-water).

The idea of using service=* for this kind of functional characterization 
(see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:waterway%3Dcanal) is that 
for the mapper the purpose of an artificial waterway might not be 
easily observable locally so the basic tagging as a waterway is 
possible without knowing that.

But if you define waterway=leat as any smaller artificial waterway with 
the primary purpose being carrying water to somewhere as opposed to 
carrying water away from somewhere that is sufficiently well defined 
and universally understandable to avoid larger misinterpretation.  So 
why not.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/