[Tagging] Tagging type of ownership of a road

[Jens Glad Balchen]

On 14.04.2023 00:30, stevea wrote:
> A search might be able to discern "in which" jurisdiction(s) a road is 
> found, much like a geocoder works with a minimal amount of data 
> "scattered around" (geographically) enough to determine "close enough 
> to a node to be associated with it" (as a place, for example), or 
> "inside the polygon that denotes a particular municipality."  Those 
> are working strategies for geocoders and a minimal amount of tagging 
> data to "feed" them, and similarly, we don't want more than the 
> minimal, necessary amount of data about road ownership, too. 
> /Where/ it is has already been encoded merely by the fact of its 
> geographic coordinates of where it is in the map.  We don't need to 
> redundantly add these.  Something like "private, municipal, county, 
> regional, state, national / federal" or whatever as values to a 
> well-chosen tag, yes.  That can work.

It seems that ownership=* does this and has the necessary values already 
in place, so I think that will be the preferred tag for further work.

Thanks for all the input.

> Finally in this discussion, it almost is never a good idea to throw in 
> the word "type" (as in the Subject) when it isn't necessary:  it can 
> only add to more confusion.  I'll know what is meant (and so will 
> others) as "Tagging ownership of a road" is discussed, without adding 
> the word "type" to the dialog.

The point was to differentiate between tagging the specific owner of a 
road and tagging the type of entity that the owner is. "Tagging 
ownership" could refer to both.

As a result of this discussion, I see that this is the difference 
between the tags owner and ownership, so I guess that is just the 
convention OSM chose at some point to differentiate. It certainly 
doesn't follow linguistically. Without already knowing this is the 
convention, using "type of" to differentiate between specific owner and 
type of owner/ownership seems entirely legitimate to me.

Cheers,

Jens
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