[Tagging] spring:type=hot deprecation

[nathan case]

My apologies if this has been covered previously.

natural=water is described as the tag for “Any inland body of water, from natural such as a lake or pond to artificial like a moat or canal” where “The type of water body can be specified with water=*”.

This hot_springs thread got me questioning why springs aren’t therefore included in the water tag?  Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_of_water) suggests it, along with a few other water features that are currently tagged as “natural=*”, should perhaps be tagged as “natural=water, water=*”

Specifically, the following inland water features listed in “natural=*”:

wetland (perhaps an ambiguous one though as coastal wetlands aren’t inland)
glacier (ice is water)
spring (and therefore hot_spring too)

are all defined as bodies of water. So why are they not included in the water tag, which covers “any” inland body of water?

Cheers,

Nathan

From: Joseph Eisenberg <joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, January 8, 2021 2:57 PM
To: OpenStreetMap Tagging <tagging at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Re: [Tagging] spring:type=hot deprecation

Geothermal hot springs look and smell and function differently than a water spring.

It makes sense to tag them differently, and natural=hot_spring is the popular way to do this.

Similarly a natural=geyser should not be tagged only as a natural=spring

Tags are free. There is no harm in allowing different tags for different features.

—Joseph Eisenberg

On Fri, Jan 8, 2021 at 12:02 AM Stefan Tauner <stefan.tauner at gmx.at<mailto:stefan.tauner at gmx.at>> wrote:
On Fri, 8 Jan 2021 08:17:20 +0100 (CET)
Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging <tagging at openstreetmap.org<mailto:tagging at openstreetmap.org>> wrote:

> I set its status to deprecated as it
>
> 1) was already described as deprecated ("Please use natural=hot_spring instead")
> 2) competing tag is significantly more used
>
> See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:spring:type%3Dhot
>
> Feel free to revert that if someone disagrees

I am not strictly rejecting this but here are my 2ct:

There was a proposal for natural=hot_spring that was met with a lot of
criticism and was never put to vote. The usage numbers are 1:20 but
this has to put in perspective since iD has added support (only) for
natural=hot_spring so it is not really surprising that it has
significant more uses (I did not check though if chronology matches
that assumption).

Combined they have about 3500 uses. This is not prohibitively many to
manually check and change them to spring:type=hot (I have done similarly
laborious edits in the past). IMHO the only argument for not doing
that, and/or trying to standardize spring:type are the support by some
data users (I only know OSMand and that can easily be changed...).
I personally think that natural=hot_spring is a mistake (I have no
history with either of those tags whatsoever and only became aware of
them by your email but it seems obvious to me after skimming through
the proposal discussion).

--
Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner

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