Convention for tagging in Thailand

Ok, so I jump into the line of fire here, probably I’m going to get a lot of flak.
Once the flak has died down, perhaps a final document could be made into a sticky post.

But anyway, so my own simple convention for armchair tagging at the moment:

  • try to follow the road nomenclature outlined in the Thailand wiki

  • In villages tag all the easy visible roads as residential (no matter of paved or not), usually arranged in a grid pattern (apart from major roads that pass through).

  • Tiny little alleys between residential grid roads I labeled so far as living street, but would be fine to change all of them to service, and service=alley (unfortunately, this is a bit cumbersome in potlatch).

  • Roads in housing estates are labeled as residential (not service), they can be access restriction if known.

  • Roads in Wats, Schools, Military compounds, industrial sections, shopping malls, highway service stations are marked as service road.

  • Wats get a node (place of worship, buddhism). If one sees gates, I sometimes add the “gate” symbol at the entrance (I copied this based on other examples I saw) . I’m not quite happy with “gate” here, if someone has a better idea…
    Of course, buildings, the whole compound etc. can be outlined, but to me it’s not a priority.

  • Schools get a school node tag. Hospitals get a hospital tag,

  • Pretty much all artificial water bodies are designated as reservoirs (i.e. the regular shaped ones next villages), are the ones which have a dam on one side, usually easily visible. I draw in the Dam as a closed path.

I use Potlatch almost all the time, but I never use the prefixes.

In this specific case you would hit “+hser” then “+salley”
(you can also use = instead of +, which is easier on US keyboard layout)

Now I have one alley, on the next road I can just hit “r” (repeat tags?). “r” will copy the tags from the previously selected way to the currently selected way.

Whether this is easier for you or not, I don’t know - but it works pretty well for me.

Thanks for the tips. I’ll try that.

An addendum to the “tiny alleys”: I only add them if they extend past a number of buildings. If a path, road seems to lead only to a single building, it could simply be a private path/driveway, which I don’t mark.

These is quite generic advice, i.e. not really specific to Thailand. I don’t think we need go into such detail for every type of venue.

Anyway, I’d like to clarify that when such places are tagged as areas, the areas supersede the nodes, which should be removed.

barrier=entrance might be better than barrier=gate if a physical gate doesn’t exist. Not sure about those standalone archways which aren’t attached to anything though.

Yes, of course in the future when things are tagged as areas, it can superseed the tags. But actually producing correctly tagged areas is not trivial. If you want to do it properly, you have to locally check out the actual boundary, or look up the land registry.
Even being present on the ground at the site, this may not be trivial, unless you have a nice fence around the whole compound that you can follow.

As to the gates, indeed, I was also thinking of the archways, that’s why I wasn’t happy with the gate. Of course it seems that sometimes one has to live with counterintuitive nomenclature, based on comments in other threads, such as service=alley, for residential alleys.

Slightly off topic, but I agree with the philosophy of areas superceed nodes …
Its just a shame that with better aerial coverage, when I convert those Fuel station nodes (amenity=fuel), and add the tag to the building area, in Potlatch 2, the nice fuel pump icon disappears in the edit screen.
So even though there is now a building outline, the fuel station icon has gone !!
I think it renders correctly, but I don’t guess anyone knows a work around ? … apart from change to JOSM ! haha.
Russ

@Russ -
FYI, if you tag an area with amenity=fuel, it does not render an icon in the JOSM edit screen either. AFAIK, you should see the fuel icon on your Garmin maps though.

Dave