[Tagging] Feature Proposal - Voting - boundary=aboriginal_lands

[Paul Allen]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 1:55 AM Doug Hembry <doughembry at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> Everyone seems to have forgotten boundary=administrative with its
> associated admin_level=n tag, which IMHO is pretty analogous to
> boundary=protected_area with its protect_class=n tag.


I didn't forget it.  I neglected to mention it because I didn't feel like
opening both ends of a
can of worms and figured one end was enough.  Now that you raise the issue,
I don't like the
numbers in admin_level, but at least they are sort of hierarchical, whereas
protect_class is not,
and there are very few of them.

They even both have look-up tables by country. And the class numbers are
> not arbitrary,
> Mateusz, - they map to IUCN categories.
>

That wasn't clear to me from the documentation.  I inferred that might be
the case but I
didn't see an explicit mention.  Then again, there is way too much
documentation to wade
through before I saw a mention of IUCN at all.  That ought to have been
made clear in the
introduction, probably the first paragraph of the introduction, and maybe
the first sentence
of that paragraph.  But that still wouldn't redeem it.

But seriously, how many aboriginal lands do you think a mapper would
> have to tag before they remember "protect_class=24"?
>

How many mappers handle nothing but aboriginal lands?  Are there so many
aboriginal lands
that even one mapper could deal with those and have time for nothing else?
I'd guess that most
mappers try to deal with everything in a locality they're mapping.  But
protected areas are rare
and you're asking people to remember ALL of those magic numbers in case
they come across
a nature reserve, or aboriginal land, or any of dozens of other things.


> And, as for the future archaeologists, and "human readable": Correct use
> of the boundary=protected_area tag actually requires the use of
> protect_title=* tag that provides users with the human readable title of
> this area-type (note: not the "name", which may also be present). ie,
> protect_title= Indigenous Protected Areas, or Indian Reservations, or
> Terra Indigena, or Territorio Indigena, etc,..


The protect_title is duplicating information in the class.  So you're
asking a mapper to type in
(and possibly get wrong) what should be a look-up mechanism.  Either
protect_title is unnecessary
or protect_class is.  Unless, of course, protect_class is so broad that
protect_title is needed to
flesh it out, in which case protect_class is useless.


> But although I don't buy your "numbers are bad" argument [...]
>

Numbers are bad.  Not always, of course.  building:levels is numeric.  Most
house numbers are
purely numeric (only most, because of things like 12A).  But magic numbers,
which IUCN are,
are bad in a human interface.  They are a good way of reducing storage in a
database (at the
expense of compute resources) so might be appropriate there, hidden from
the eyes of all but
the database coders.

What you're asking for means that, to make the thing human-friendly, EVERY
editor has to have a
look-up table so mappers can be presented with a list of comprehensible
choices like "aboriginal
lands" which get mapped to protect_class=24.  What you're asking for is
that EVERY data consumer
has to have a look-up table so humans get to see that an area on the map is
aboriginal land rather
than protect_class=24.  Technically, it's possible; realistically it won't
get implemented in all
applications.

The "numbers are bad" assertion worries me and prompts a broader question:
> if this is "policy",


It is not (as far as I am aware) a policy.  It is the feeling of a number
of people here that magic
numbers are a bad idea.  I suspect that many of those people base that
feeling, as I do, upon
experience of programming and/or user interface design.


> does it mean that boundary=protected_area, and protect_class=* tags are
> doomed in OSM?


I wouldn't say they're doomed, but I doubt they'll get universal adoption
as the primary way of
tagging such things, particularly if tags such as aboriginal_lands gain
approval.  This discussion
isn't the first time I came across protect_class etc.  Some time ago I
looked at how to map a
nature reserve and saw the choices were incomprehensible mess of
protect_class and friends
or leisure=nature_reserve.  Guess which one I chose.

I have no objection whatsoever if you wanted to introduce a tag like
IUCN=*.  In fact, I think it
would be a great idea.  Mappers who care about it could use it.  Queries
with overpass-turbo
could use it.  Nice idea.  But protect_class and friends?  Nah.

-- 
Paul
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