[Tagging] RFC - A broad look at fountains

[Warin]

On 7/10/22 23:37, Davidoskky via Tagging wrote:
>
> I wish to broadly discuss the definition of fountains and similar 
> objects that have the objective of delivering water (drinkable or not).
>
> Everything I wish to discuss in this thread is about man made 
> constructions that transport water through pipes, I will thus not talk 
> about wells and such things.
>
> This is not a proposal, since I first wish to identify the main 
> problems with what I’m going to suggest.
>
> The final objective is the deprecation of man_made=water_tap in order 
> to unify all these features under the same tag.
>
>
>
>   Background
>
> The tags pertaining to this category are quite a disorganized mess 
> with a lot of overlaps.
>
> The main tag used to indicate a place where drinking water is 
> available is amenity=drinking_water. This is a very affirmed tag and 
> works very well, because it provides indications as to where it is 
> possible to find water for drinking. It is thus immediately useful to 
> the users of the map and it doesn’t require mappers to go through 5 
> different tags to indicate that.
>
> The second most used tag in this category amenity=fountain, this 
> describes a man made object that provides a flow of water. The flow of 
> water can be continuous or it can be stopped by a person. The fountain 
> can be decorative or it may provide some service (such as providing 
> drinking water). It is unclear whether the majority of the tagged 
> features are decorative fountains or not, the wiki appears to suggest 
> so but in many countries there is no distinction among the word for a 
> decorative fountain and a service one.
>
The original intention was to tag decorative fountains.
>
> The third relevant tag is man_made=water_tap; this indicates any man 
> made construction that provides water (drinkable or not) through a 
> tap, thus the flow of the water can be started and stopped by a person.
>

I would never describe a tap as a fountain. Just me?

> The last relevant tag is man_made=drinking_fountain, this tag has very 
> few usages and a thread about its deprecation has already been 
> started, thus I will not discuss about it in detail.
>

I would never describe a 'drinking fountain' as a decorative fountain. 
Just me?

>
>
> Popularity of these tags:
>
> 1.
>
>     amenity=drinking_water: 266,535
>
> 2.
>
>     amenity=fountain: 151,218
>
> 3.
>
>     man_made=water_tap: 23,678
>
> 4.
>
>     man_made=drinking_fountain: 656
>
>
>
>   Problems with the current tagging scheme
>
> The current tagging scheme works very well to tag places where people 
> can find water to drink. This is great since this information is very 
> useful to map users.
>
> However, it often fails at describing how the water is delivered or 
> what is delivering it. amenity=drinking_water is a great generic tag 
> that works perfectly for this, however more specialized tags should 
> allow to distinguish different features that are delivering the water.
>

The tag amenity=drinking_water fails to tag non drinking water...

> This is the objective of man_made=water_tap and amenity=fountain. 
> These provide a description of the object that delivers the water. 
> Moreover, these tags can be used to describe both systems that deliver 
> drinking water or systems that deliver non potable water. This is done 
> mainly by adding the secondary tag drinking_water=*, even though in 
> many cases man_made=water_tap coexists with amenity=drinking_water.
>

The combination of man_made=water_tap coexists with 
amenity=drinking_water was done for the render! It serves no other 
function and amenity=drinking_water could be removed and yet retain the 
essential information.

>
>
> amenity=fountain has a subtag fountain=* used to describe the type of 
> fountain. This subtag is not widely used, but it contains several 
> different values:
>
>  *
>
>     splash_pad: 1458
>
>  *
>
>     decorative: 950
>
>  *
>
>     nozzle: 885
>
>  *
>
>     bubbler: 319
>
>  *
>
>     drinking: 266
>
> Among other values describing the specific name of the type of 
> fountains (nasone fountains for example are a style of fountains used 
> to provide drinking water in Rome).
>
> Thus, currently the tag amenity=fountain is used both to describe 
> decorative fountains and to describe fountains that provide drinking 
> water or simple generic nozzles.
>
> The tag fountain=* is not well defined since it can describe both the 
> use of the fountain (fountain=drinking) and the particular style of 
> the fountain (fountain=nasone).
>
>
>
> The biggest issue with this is the overlap of the two tags 
> amenity=fountain and man_made=water_tap. If amenity=fountain was used 
> to only describe large decorative fountains, which cannot supposedly 
> be switched off by a common person this wouldn’t be a problem. 
> However, since this feature can represent nozzles and drinking 
> fountains, some of the fountains here represented can have a water tap.
>
> Thus the same feature might be tagged either as man_made=water_tap or 
> amenity=fountain. The tag amenity=fountain has no way to specify that 
> the water flow can be started or stopped through a tap.
>
> Out of these two tags, the most problematic appears to be 
> man_made=water_tap, since it describes any generic object that has a 
> tap. That could be anything, thus this tag doesn’t really provide 
> insightful information about what it is describing, it just provides 
> one of its properties.
>

Fountain also does not define a tap...

How would you better define a water tap?

A water outlet with water flow controlled by an operator controlled 
valve? The outlet maybe plain or provide a coupling mechanism such as a 
thread to attachment to other thing like a hose. ????



>   How could this be solved?
>
> I believe that the best course of action is the deprecation of 
> man_made=water_tap. This tag is redundant and not descriptive.
>
> However, the problem with its deprecation is finding a valid 
> alternative to it. It would make sense to transform it into a 
> secondary value of amenity=fountain, such as tap=yes.
>
> However, there is no shared consensus that amenity=fountain should 
> actually be used to describe non decorative fountains.
>
>
>
> I believe there are two courses of action that might be taken, 
> according to how the community feels about it.
>
> The first of the two, the one I would personally prefer, is defining 
> amenity=fountain as any man made structure that provides water through 
> pipes and is not a sink. This would require a better definition of the 
> subtag fountain=* and the definition of some sensible values it can 
> assume by deprecating the several current ones; since this tag is not 
> widely used this shouldn’t be a problem.
>
> The second alternative would be the creation of a new tag used to 
> describe non decorative fountains in order to separate these from 
> amenity=fountain. This new tag would have a subtag similar to 
> fountain=* to specify the use of the fountain.
>
>
amenity=water_outlet?
>
>
>   Features to describe
>
> However we decide to proceed, I feel that there are some particular 
> properties of this entity that should easily be describable.
>
>
>
>  *
>
>     Does it provide drinking water? (through drinking_water=*)
>
Keep - already exists.
>
>  *
>
>
>  *
>
>     Can the flow of water be stopped through a tap? (New subtag tap=yes)
>
definition? The major criticism of man_made=water_tap is it's 
definition... so there would be the same need to define tap here..
>
>  *
>
>
>  *
>
>     What is the specific use of this fountain? (provide drinking
>     water, provide water for irrigation, water for cleaning, water for
>     animals…)
>

Hose hold garden taps are used for lots of purposes... no need to define 
this .. another rabbit hole.

>  *
>
>
>  *
>
>     What is the style of this fountain (nasone…)
>
>
>
> Another issue that arose was the differentiation of “bubblers” from 
> other fountains providing drinking water.
>
> The main difference among the two is the direction of the jet of 
> water, thus a tag describing such property might be desirable.
>

I have mentioned is another thread something along the lines of

water_direction=upwards_arc/down/up/horizontal/decorative_spray/* ???

> Among other things that this could fix is a better description of 
> amenity=watering_place, by providing information about whether it is 
> man made or naturally occurring.
>
> I’ll wait some comments about this whole ordeal so that we can decide 
> whether it actually makes sense to apport these modifications to the 
> tagging scheme and what the amenity=fountain tag should describe. The 
> main thing I want to push forward for now is the deprecation of 
> man_made=water_tap in favour of a more descriptive tag yet to be 
> completely defined.
>

What is a more descriptive tag for a 'water tap'? These words are in 
common use in Britain .. and that is what OSM is supposed to use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_(valve)

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