[Talk-GB] Naming of sewage treatment works and other such infrastructure

[Russ Garrett]

On Tue, 14 Feb 2023 at 23:00, Andy Townsend <ajt1047 at gmail.com> wrote:
> That doesn't need to be in the data, does it though?  We wouldn't expand
> "Derby" out to "Derby Railway Station" just in case someone somehow
> missed "railway=station" in the data on e.g.
> https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/map/map.html#18/52.91617/-1.46364 .
>
> With regards to sewage works etc., renderers can append e.g. "(sewage)"
> like here:
> https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/map/map.html#19/54.08237/-1.26170 if
> they don't have a specific way of representing sewage works.

There's clearly a line somewhere - why do schools have the word
"school" in their name tags, for example? There's a hidden set of
rules which we're, perhaps subconsciously, applying already. I think
there's an argument that it's public transport which is the exception
here (although it turns out that airports in OSM have the word
"airport" in their name).

Ultimately omitting these words from the name tag is just adding more
work for people who want to render a generic map, and I'm not sure for
what gain. With public transport, I think there is a good argument,
because names are pretty consistent. If you're rendering a
transport-centric map, you probably don't want the word "station"
everywhere, and if you're rendering a generic map, you always need
specific styles for public transport anyway.

(Having said that, we have stations in the UK which use the suffix
"Halt" rather than "Station" - and in that case "Halt" *is* included
in the station name.)

I think the set of OSM data users who would prefer these descriptive
words to be omitted from objects like sewage works and substations is
vanishingly small (I don't really care about it for openinframap - I'd
just prefer it to be consistent), but if we do omit them, every single
generic map consumer will have to do the work (or more likely not
bother, and have confusingly-named objects on their map).

I'm not sure how much it matters in reality, but there is also some
nuance in some of these names - Thames Water distinguishes between
"Water Treatment Works" and "Advanced Water Treatment Works", although
this is not necessarily a distinction we want to encode in tagging.

Cheers,

--
Russ Garrett
russ at garrett.co.uk