[Tagging] key:drinking_water for OSM ways

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

Am Fr., 21. Feb. 2020 um 07:13 Uhr schrieb European Water Project <
europeanwaterproject at gmail.com>:

> Hi Martin,
>
> There are a couple of issues I see with drinking_water=yes not having a
> concept of access.
>
> 1. Where is the observability  ? How can I know if a water tank has
> drinking quality water or just agriculture quality water ?
>


indeed, if you cannot access the water it may also not verifiable to know
whether it is drinkable, hence you will not add the tag.
We will not end with all drinking water on earth having this tag. It is
just a property for those places where a mapper identifies drinkable water
and sees a point in adding it to the map.




> 2.   But there is an even bigger issue --- and I will admit that I am
> biased because of the European Water Project's use case.
> For a map feature to be useful, it should have universality. Ie. if one
> maps restaurants with toilets, at least customers should have access ...
>
Someone who goes to the OSM way where there is a water tank, even with a
> wallet full of cash, will die of thirst before getting a drink.
>


I don't know, I would expect going to another person, preferably, and ask
for water. It completely depends on the context. If you are in a remote
area (otherwise you would likely not die of thirst anyway) and risking to
die of thirst you will likely drink any available water, regardless of its
OSM tagging. There is also no guarantee that an object which has
drinking_water=yes in OSM is actually drinking water, and even if it was at
the time of tagging the situation may have changed.



> It's similar to toilet=yes ...   A restaurant with a toilet for employees
> only, probably shouldn't have the tag.
> Yes, there is an access tag, but in most cases access is implied.
>


access is implied for amenity=toilet, like it is implied for
amenity=drinking_water (feature), while it is not implied for descriptive
properties (like drinking_water=yes). It is the main tag (feature tag) that
may have implications about accessibility.



> drinking_water = yes, seems to come with access in 99% of the 61,300 nodes
> and the large majority of the 8,178 ways.
>


yes, because people will usually not map drinking water=* for private
features I guess. A water tank may be an exception. I do not know public
water tanks, and while I guess somewhere they might exist, it would be up
to people knowing this situation to decide on appropriate tagging. As I
also wrote in my comment above: accessibility can be either explicit or
implicit through the providing feature, but it is not implied in the
drinking_water=yes property.

Cheers
Martin
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