[Tagging] Delete vs Removed LSP?

[stevea]

On purpose (to make a point, not to stir up any existing but diminishing controversy), I use the example of "railway."

I choose this because railways have been around for a couple centuries ("peaking," at least in the amount of rail in my country, about a century ago), are still around, are growing in amount and complexity in a big way and have very, very long-lasting effects on the landscape, landuse, existing infrastructure, re-purposed infrastructure and much more.  Their "life cycle," or aspects of their existence that might (or might not) be mapped persist for decades, sometimes centuries.

The complexity of tagging associated with railway that is partly lifecycle-related (though not usually part of the syntax of how we tag it in OSM) reflects this:  railway=disused, railway=abandoned, railway=razed....  Some of these are accepted, some of these (and more) are used but others think they shouldn't be (or they should be put into another database like OpenHistoricalMap).

There are plenty of objects like this mapped in OSM (like a street-side telephone closet that gets repurposed as a book-borrow-box — great example!) which have a life-cycle (or potential re-use) that might not be centuries-long, but can last for decades or even "simply" MANY years.  OSM can and should accommodate these, whether with a life-cycle prefix in the syntax of its tagging or not, but at least in the minds of mappers that "long-term things can and do exist in the real-world, and OSM must map them in accurate and agreeable ways, even as they evolve from one thing to a truly different thing."

How we get there is "the devil in the details," but OSM can and should do this, as such mapping is simply a reflection of the real world.  In some cases this means "remove," in some cases this means "modify with re-applied tags because the semantics have changed."  While there is nothing wrong with reaching out to ask (like here), in simple terms, "tag your best."  That way, OSM, our map data, downstream users...we all win.

A little imagination that allows what might seem like "stretching" a tag to become a new, different (but related) tag, doesn't hurt here:  this is a case where OSM's tenet of "be bold" is good advice.