[Talk-us-massachusetts] How do I Mark Publicly Owned Land?

[Greg Troxel]

Joseph Holmes <Joseph.Holmes at alum.mit.edu> writes:

> I have a question about the correct way to mark land owned by the Town
> of Acton. We have several categories of land, which are currently marked
> as follows:
>
> Conservation Land:   boundary=protected_area / leisure=nature_reserve /
> protect_class=5 / protection_title=local_conservation_land /
> protected=perpetuity

I would add "landuse=conservation" even though other OSM people, mostly
not in MA, don't understand why that's sensible :-) In all seriousness,
this tag was used in the massgis openspace import and hasn't caught on
because people think a really complicated protect_class scheme is better.

As people on talk@ are tired of hearing, I think every bit of land
should have a single landuse, and "conservation" means "the primary
purpose of this land is to preserve it in a mostly natural state for the
indefinite future".

leisure=nature_reserve is appropriate if humans are welcome to at least
walk on the land.  If it's just for creatures (a true refuge), then
something else is needed

> Publicly Owned Farm Land:   boundary=protected_area / landuse=farmland

If there is no APR (i.e., if the town could decide to build a school or
a 40B sort of thing), then boundary=protected_area is probably not
appropriate.  If it is, it probably deserves some kind of protect_class.
Either way, if it's a farm today, landuse=farmland is appropriate.

> Park:   leisure=park

that sounds right

> Water District:   landuse=reservoir_watershed

Not sure about 'district', but that sounds right for land on which most
activities are prohibited in order to protect the reservoir or wells.
This is a stronger than wellhead protection zones where only some things
are restricted and aren't landuse.

> Cemetery Commission:   landuse=cemetery

Not sure about all commission property (like an admin building or a
disconnected maintenance shed), but that sounds right for the parcels on
which cemeteries are.  See also
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dgrave_yard but
probably landuse=cemetery is better for most things.

> School Department:   amenity=school

For the grounds of a school.  If there is admin stuff that is really
disconnected, maybe use landuse=commercial or landuse=municipal but the
latter is not necessarily adopted.

> However we have other land owned by the town for "general municipal"
> purposes. We use the OSM data as input to draw our conservation trail
> maps. And the trails are often partly on these lands which are not
> formally conservation land. So we need to mark these. I propose just
> using the following:
>
> area=yes / owner=Town of Acton / ownership=municipal

Generally, there is a notion against marking ownership like this.  I
would say that landuse=municipal is reasonable for land that is
government owned for town government purposes, if landuse=commercial
(town hall?), industrial (highway garage) and all other specific tags do
not seem appropriate.

If your goal is to get a specific parcel rendered differently , I would
ask why (for that parcel, to find out the goal, not to give you a hard
time).  If the land is wooded and has trails, then
leisure=nature_reserve is entirely appropriate, even though there is no
formal long-term protection.  Just omit the boundary=protected_area
part.

In general, my bias is to tag the current actual use.

If you are trying to distinguish town-run leisure=nature_reserve from
one from by e.g. SVT, to rendered differently, then I would lean to
"operator=" as "Acton" or "SVT" to describe the authority, and have your
rendered key off that.  The big point to me is that the tags should be
generally useful to all reasonable renderers, not just what you are
doing.


Overall, you may need to maintain a list of way ids as a side table for
your renderer if you want to mark town stuff differently.  At some point
marking things that are special to your render may not belong in the
db. It's a tough call where that line is.
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