[Talk-GB] What is a residential area?

[David Woolley]

On 07/05/2019 15:03, Martin Wynne wrote:

> 
> But is that what OSM is for -- to describe the *purpose* of a thing?

The original purpose of OSM was to break the monopoly on map data held 
by commercial mappers, by taking advantage of the ready availability of 
GPS equipment, so the purposes for which the data would be used would be 
all applications for which OS data was used, with a bias towards 
applications that needed a lot of data.
> 
> I thought the idea was describe the *physical* object and its location? 
> Physically it is a house built in a garden.

Describing the physical object is a way of objectively mapping, but if 
that is all you do, you don't need a map; just use the aerial imagery 
directly.

Saying that something consists of a building within a garden is actually 
going beyond describing what can be seen, as it basically says that 
building is subordinate to the garden.  Whilst I wouldn't want you do do 
this, if you really want to map without making any inferences, map the 
garden as natural= and map it in just those areas that are not house, 
drive, hard standing, etc.
> 
> For all we know, it may not be anyone's residence -- it could be being 
> used as offices, say. In that case landuse=residential would be wrong, 
> it should be landuse=commercial. But it's still a house in a garden.

It's a building, partly surrounded by grass.

landuse and house both imply a level of abstraction based on judgements 
of the intended use that go beyond a literal description of what you can 
see.

Although I picked on the problem with having both fence and garden main 
tags in the housing estate link, that does correctly show how you would 
use garden, when micro-mapping.  (I didn't pick up the fact that the way 
the fences are mapped is making assertions about the legal ownership of 
the fences which are probably wrong.)