[Tagging] type=* tags on trees

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Thu Aug 19 21:46:52 UTC 2021


Hi,

On 8/18/21 20:36, Casper Kersten wrote:
> I discovered that there are over 36,000 trees tagged with type=*

...

> I propose to retag many of the type=* tags on trees to other common 
> tagging schemes 

Any such analysis should not simply look at what currently is in OSM and 
modify it; doing this thoroughly requires looking at the history in 
order to answer questions like:

* how did these type tags get into OSM?
* are there perhaps people who will continue to add these tags even if 
we superficially "fix" things?
* are there processes or programs or instructions somewhere that lead 
people to add these?
* have there been other cleanup efforts?

A look at *current* data does not answer these questions sufficiently as 
later edits by other people might have distorted the picture.

A cursory glance at the history tells me that a total of 585.000 trees 
with a type=* tag have been added to OSM over its lifetime; if you say 
that only 36.000 of them remain seems to indicate that some amount of 
cleaning has already been going on. This should be investigated more 
closely.

The very first occurrence of a type=* tag on a tree was 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/16949837 in 2008; a comment in the 
current version of that object points to a previous mechanical edit by a 
German user and a discussion here 
https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=613129 - that (German) 
discussion also contains the sentence "others have tried this already 
and their edits were reverted on formal grounds" - something I have no 
recollection of but I assume traces of this will be in the data.

It appears the these are the top 20 users who have added trees with a 
type=* tag:

scubbx_ogdvienna_trees: 122201
NonnEmiliaService: 87700
Manel Clos: 78735
Badarau Andrei: 32332
geodz: 17366
Der Troisdorfer: 7576
miha12: 6729
elmarburke: 6546
Elwood: 5562
nickrosencrans: 4708
whb: 4383
michalgt86: 4310
S-Man42: 3996
Val: 3775
Ross Aldrich: 3730
black_bike: 3715
KartoGrapHiti: 3688
RatZillaS: 3285
Marcel Herault: 3283
biker at gf: 2867

It appears that these are the top 20 changesets responsible for adding 
trees with a type=* tag:

c5007703: 78726
c14113662: 49704
c14112119: 49387
c14115324: 23110
c14801900: 19999
c14801328: 19996
c14802114: 19995
c14801687: 19942
c41296950: 8243
c20636106: 6546
c19945683: 4659
c41264076: 4317
c14801233: 3884
c14800963: 3884
c14337471: 2827
c6841834: 2748
c41153982: 1878
c10008409: 1724
c41546930: 1494
c8851144: 1399

Most of these are likely imports; it would probably make sense to make 
contact with the importers to make sure they don't run some sort of 
automatic update that might re-introduce type tags, and/or if their 
scripts are somewhere public they should be encouraged to fix them.

All this is a lot more work than simply running Overpass and JOSM and 
replacing a few tags, but in my opinion, without proper analysis of the 
root of the problem, it's just cosmetics of little value.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"



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