[OSM-talk] Do we care if its forest or wood? Natural world mapping ...

[Tom Chance]

On Monday 20 Jul 2009 17:08:30 Andrew Ayre wrote:
> I've been adding the national forests in Arizona, and the Wikipedia
> definition doesn't fit too well. There are areas here that are inside an
> administrative boundary called a National Forest where the trees are
> very sparse - 10s of meters between them. Elsewhere in the forest the
> trees are dense but it is a gradual transition from sparse to dense that
> could take 50 miles or more to travel through.

The point is that we won't ever find a useful correspondence between real "out 
there in the world" uses of "Forest" and "Wood" (which are already very 
inconsistent), everyone's individual perceptions of the difference, dictionary 
/ encyclopedia / professional definitions, and the reality of the slightly 
chaotic OSM tagging.

The division of landuse and natural, forest and wood, is utterly pointless.

Hence my proposal to only use natural=wood, and allow further tags to 
designate the type of tree, whether it's used for commercial logging, etc.

Regards,
Tom