[Tagging] Subtag for place=locality?

Joseph Eisenberg joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com
Mon Apr 15 12:33:17 UTC 2019


> I'm certain the gold rushes Alaska experienced
> during the past 150 years contributed to many of these abandoned "Populated
> Places".

I've checked, and I don't see any tag like "historic=campsite" or
similar. This could account for many of the named places I know in my
home area in Northern California as well. I also wonder how the
locations of nomadic campsites are tagged in places like the Sahara or
Mongolia. Nomadic lifestyles are becoming very rare, but there are
still a few places. There are still Irish travelers and Roma people
who live in temporary settlements. I wonder how these are tagged. They
are not tourism=caravan_site but place=hamlet suggests a settlement,
rather than a temporary camp?

> I tag a typical abandoned place=locality with only the name, the source,
> the abandoned=yes tag and occasionally with a description if I think it's
> interesting enough.

I like the suggestion from this thread to add
abandoned:place=hamlet/village for the former mining towns. This key
has already been used over 6000 times. It would also be possible to
use disused:place=* for settlements that are uninhabited but still
have buildings, eg a ghost town.
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/abandoned%3Aplace

> Sometimes people tag groups of islands with the locality tag as opposed to
> creating a relation of some sort.

There is a request to render place=archipelago now (Issue #3394); I
will look into it. It's only used 740 times, so it would help if more
people start using the tag. It would certainly be useful here in
Indonesia. https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/place=archipelago

-Joseph
(BTW, I would recommend tagging archipelagos as simple nodes or as
multipolygon relations that include all of the islands. The wiki pages
suggests using a "type=cluster" relation, but this would be hard to
use)



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