[Tagging] Landcover... not again?....!

[Tod Fitch]

> On May 6, 2022, at 2:45 AM, Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging <tagging at openstreetmap.org> wrote:
> That is wrong order, OpenStreetMap Carto should not be used as a hammer to
> force editors to adapt tagging.
> 
> For example landcover=trees tagging was soundly rejected by JOSM and iD developers
> https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2548 <https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2548>
> https://josm.openstreetmap.de/browser/josm/trunk/data/validator/ignoretags.cfg?rev=11949 <https://josm.openstreetmap.de/browser/josm/trunk/data/validator/ignoretags.cfg?rev=11949>
> 
> And also OSM Carto developers
> https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2548 <https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2548>
> (yes, including me)
> 
> Note also that proposal was never brought to a vote by its authors
> since it was created in 2010, presumably because it does not have a
> clear support.

A tag that has been used over 300k times despite not being approved by people on this mail list, supported as presets by the editors or the OSM Carto developers definitely has some support among the mapping community at large. Just not a handful of developers supporting the most commonly used tools of the few active individuals on this email list.

For what it is worth, in my map generation I actually render landcover=* only. If the landcover tag is missing I make assumptions about the land cover based landuse and/or natural.

While at odds with several members of this email list, it makes perfect sense to me to map what is seen with as few implicit assumptions about why the feature is there. I see trees, great the area is covered with trees. Are they there naturally or because of direct human intervention? I don’t care why. But I do want to render a map that shows there are trees there.

I am sure that this discussion will eventually wind down with no conclusion only to be revived some years from now with the same arguments being re-hashed. And probably the same people rehashing them.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to support natural=(some arbitrary values), landuse=(some other arbitrary values), and landcover=(some values verifiable in the field) in my rendering.

Cheers!


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