[Tagging] attraction=animal

[Joseph Eisenberg]

This just came up again at Openstreetmap-carto

It looks like many zoo enclosures are currently tagged with landuse=*
or natural=* to get a rendering, although double-tagging with
tourism=attraction is also popular (and hard to argue against, due to
the vague meaning of a tourism attraction).

However, the issue about the name is real.

Some zoos do have cute names for certain enclosures, like "African
Safari",  "Reptile Grotto", but most zoo maps just label the common
name of the animal, eg "African Elephants."

Many mappers just add the names of each type of animal to the
enclosure, which can lead to a long name when there are several
species in one place, eg in the Berlin zoo we have
name="Südafrikanische Blauhalsstrauße, Großer Kudu, Blessbock und
Springbock" - in English that might be "South African Blue-necked
Bouquet, Great Kudu, Blesbok and Springbok":
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/551946684/

The alternative that would be more precise would be to use genus=* and
species=* - but these tags require using the latin name, which is
rather more difficult for the average mapper.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:species

You can also use species:en=* or species:fr=* for the common name, but
there isn't any standard tag that would mean "the species name in
local language of this area" that could be used for global renderings.

Also, it isn't feasible to tag an enclosure that has multiple species.
For example, an aviary might have 2 dozen types of birds. While you
could have semi-colon separated values for the species, it would be
unrealistic to have genus=* and species=* both in this way.

So, should we just keep tagging zoo enclosures with the names of the
animals, or is there a new tag that could work for these situations
where species= and genus= won't work?

Joseph

See recent (March 2019) emails to the Talk mailing list below:

On 3/10/19, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> sent from a phone
>
>> On 9. Mar 2019, at 15:27, Jack Armstrong Dancer at sprynet.com
>> <jacknstacy at sprynet.com> wrote:
>>
>> When I tag an animal attraction at a zoo, I use the tags, for example,
>> tourism=attraction, attraction=animal, animal=lion.
>>
>>
>> However, on the wiki page; Tag: tourism=zoo, a user is directed to use,
>> for example, name=African Elephant.
>>
>
>
> it is kind of a shortcut, generally what we tag is not just the animal but
> the compound for the animal. IMHO tourism=attraction for all kind of animal
> compounds in a zoo is born from tagging for the renderer, which is still
> ongoing in many places. E.g. here you can see a beach with the name polar
> bear (11 years ago) which has meanwhile become a bare rock with the same
> name
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/18343079/history
>
> for me attraction=animal is ok as a tag for an (implicit) compound in a zoo
> (used 11.5k times), although it has issues as it doesn’t allow to
> distinguish animals in a cage from those running around “freely”, or the
> type of enclosure (e.g. aviary), but tourism=attraction on every single item
> seems overkill.
>
> To tag the kind of animal in the compound, we could reuse the tags from
> plant tagging (“species” / “taxon”, localized if desired). With the name I
> would refer to the compound, e.g. “elephant enclosure” , “ape house”
>
> Ciao, Martin