[Tagging] Deprecation of crop=corn

[osm.tagging at thorsten.engler.id.au]

>From the perspective of a native German speaker who is now living in
Australia,

"Corn" was very confusing for a long time.

In German, "Korn" is the catch-all term for most type of cereals (wheat,
rye, oats, barley, ...) though I would have associated it with sweet corn /
maize.

And "Mais" is the term for sweet corn / maize.

So, while I have gotten used to the usage of "corn" here in Australia, it
would personally prefer if OSM could standardize on crop=maize to resolve
this ambiguity.

Cheers,
Thorsten

-----Original Message-----
From: stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> 
Sent: Saturday, 30 October 2021 17:56
To: Tag discussion, strategy and related tools <tagging at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Re: [Tagging] Deprecation of crop=corn

As another speaker of American English ("I reckon," too, though that phrase
is not ESPECIALLY common in California) I'm OK with crop=maize AND
crop=corn.  It's a bit like protect_class=24 (with boundary=protected_area)
and boundary=aboriginal_lands:  they have the same semantic meaning.
"Fusing" the two isn't always a great idea.  If there is, however, a
structured syntax scheme that looks to a more long-term harmony (like with
boundary=protected_area and the eventual proposal to deprecate protect_class
as numbers as values) then good discussion can ensue at how that best
transitions into existence.  We do OK, not perfectly, but OK with these,
they can (and do) take years.  I see no rush to deprecate crop=corn without
comprehensive proposed structure the whole world can get behind that covers
most-to-all cases.  Easier said than done, what OSM often does is "ascend a
few more rungs on a ladder towards perfection" even as we may not actually
achieve perfection.  I'm OK with that.

The tag crop=cereal can mean (in my mind) maize/corn, wheat, rice, sorghum,
amaranth...the list goes on.  This tag is not a synonym for any particular
crop, especially maize.  There are many fields of semolina wheat grown in
Italy...rice is cultivated differently from one part of the world to another
(sometimes terraced, sometimes shallow-water paddies...), yet it is still
rice cultivation.  We could use fewer assumptions and simply better tagging
of the specific crop.  Grain, or otherwise.  We do this with orchard (fruit
trees, unspecified), vineyards (grapes, varietal unspecified),
greenhouse_horticulture ("hothouses," specific crop(s) unspecified).  Tags
like leaf_type have helped with landuse=forest, things like fruit=apples or
grape=chardonnay or fruit=tomatoes or tubers=yams can't do anything but
help.  And then we'll unravel those.  We're Linnaeus right now sketching
taxonomic branches.  These do sort themselves out over time.  Via a
combination of here, in the wiki, in other
  
 venues, among people who discuss, sometimes a proposal author gets
involved...it's slow but it does work over time.

Do recall, the whole world "mapped in harmony" takes time to stitch
together.  We're doing fine and while there is lots of room to improve, OSM
really DOES improve.  We have thorny issues (forest, highway classifications
at national levels...) they take their time to unravel and better organize
syntactically.  We gain altitude.

"OSM prefers British English spelling but not necessarily the nuances of
British English vocabulary."  PreCISEly.

In the case of crop=corn and crop=cereal the former is specific, the latter
is general.  With "first-level general" tags (I use that loosely, but widely
understood to mean "more top-level"), secondary tags help.

I applaud maze=maize_maze; thank you Minh.

SteveA

_______________________________________________
Tagging mailing list
Tagging at openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging