Someone placed a bunch of landuse=industrial in the middle of the North Sea: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/619141631#map=11/55.8080/4.4711&layers=N
The names and location of these are probably right, but can someone suggest better tagging? landuse surely isn’t a good fit here.
I don’t see anything wrong with it. Don’t worry too much about the exact name of the key being used. There’s some abstraction involved in many parts of the OSM tagging scheme. This can also be seen in cases like natural=water being used for man-made ponds. What’s important is that the underlying meaning of the tags should adequately represent the real-world object. In this case, the landuse=industrial areas have also been sub-tagged with the documented tag industrial=well_cluster, which seems to appropriately describe the objects.
Personally I don’t think landuse=industrial is appropriate for these areas, but they are quite common for oil fields. There were a lot in Patagonia a few years ago, but they have largely been replaced by small industrial areas around wells & pumping facilities. In the main only small parts of these areas truly qualify as industrial (i.e, with heavy machinery, potential for pollution of the earth & ground water, etc), and I would have preferred a more specific tag relating to petroleum & gas extraction. OSM tags have multiple purposes and when one tag is used in ways which just reflects one of those purposes it tends to erode the utility of the tag for other purposes. If landuse tags were purely for describing landuse this would be OK, but as is often discussed their sematics often involves a mix of landuse, landcover, cultural and other nuances.
Ideally even if they are used this way they should be suitably sub-tagged (as in the example cited by alester) so that they can be excluded from some uses of landuse=industrial.
I’ve commented again at https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61916932 in the hope of actually getting a reply from the mapper this time.
The landuse=industrial wikipage seems clear to me (boldface are mine)
Since there is no land there, this tag should’nt be used.