Argh! Stupas as Wireless masts...

Hello AlaskaDave,
No, it’s not the rendering per se. Perhaps my comments where too long-winded.
Argument: Many Stupas are clearly not tower-shaped, (and many won’t be great as landmark, but that’s not the point). I don’t recall that professional art historical descriptions of stupas refer to them as towers
My point: use a designation that can be applied to all stupas to make it consistent.
at present a number of them are also just marked as buildings (Chedi Luang)

As to monument, no I am not tied to that at all. It just seemed to be a possible solution in absence of something else.
As to the definition of monument, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monument - perhaps a bit broader than your definition. A Stupa fits this description very well, because the very first ones were burial places of Buddha’s ashes (derived from burial mounds), and now they are places for important relics (tooth of Buddha etc.,), or other important relics, or ashes of famous monks, or ashes of people. That’s why they are actually places of worship, like any tomb/site of a famous person can be a pilgrimage site/place of worship.
So, a stupa is very much a monument. - but just to clarify, I’m not tied to it.

Thinking more about how to label ancient sites in Thailand, it occurred to me that there is a legitimate use for “tower” in Khmer sites. Art historical descriptions of sanctuaries clearly refer to the central sanctuaries as towers, e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prasat_Kravan , the central five towers, or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muang_Tum, central five towers.
So, no, I am not in principle against towers, just where appropriate. :slight_smile:

Well, seeing as we seem to be going around and around on this topic, what do you suggest?

Sorry for the delay in replying.

First, for sake of expedience, I would suggest a single Point marker is used, as you did (i.e. the tower).
I have seen a number of chedis/stupas marked out in outlines as buildings, an elaborate example is the Chedi Luang in Chiang Mai, but marking all stupas as outlines seems an excessive work at present.

So, then the question is, which tag is most suitable as marker for all stupas.

Monument ? Memorial ? Place of Worship,
or introduce a new tag : Stupa/Chedi/Pagoda for mainly the Asian regions that have them? Perhaps this could be broadly discussed?

@Endless: I don’t believe mappers should be restricted to marking stupas with either a single node or a closed way. That’s entirely up to the mapper and the particulars of the stupa being mapped. If the structure is large, a closed way can be more descriptive, even more accurate. The important thing is to get it on the map. Consequently, we need not, and should not, make such a rule. A similar situation applies to amenity=fuel. Most are mapped as nodes, some as ways. Most mappers don’t take the time to outline all the buildings in a fuel station and frankly it’s not necessary to do so.

When you ask “which tag is most suitable as a marker for all stupas?” and follow that with “Monument? Memorial? Place_of_worship?” you demonstrate in your own question why it is not possible to use the same tag in all situations. There simply is no “right” answer, no one tag will cover all. And if you delve into the arguable distinctions between tower, chedi, stupa and pagoda, you’re going to complicate things to the point that most mappers will settle for something simple and to the point anyway.

I’m following a similar discussion in the tagging group about how to classify road surfaces and the quality of those surfaces. Phew, trying to come up with a scheme that isn’t overly subjective yet accurately portrays the situation in terms of usability for all types of wheeled conveyances from roller blades and wheelchairs to 4x4 vehicles, is a huge chore. One fellow was suggesting measuring the frequency and average depth of holes in the road surface as a measure of, here they introduce a term used in Australia, trafficability! My feeling is that when mappers see something that complicated, they will opt to simply say paved or unpaved and let it go at that.

I want to encourage all involved to not make this scheme overly complex. If most of us want to add more subtags to the tower:type set, I’m fine with that. If we want to add completely new tags like stupa=yes/no, or pagoda=yes/no, man_made=pagoda, or something similar, perhaps we should introduce this topic to the tagging group or at least to a wider audience.

to alaskadave.
No, it was not the intention to restrict stupas to a single node. to me at present, given the huge white parts on the map of thailand, speedy mapping with single nodes is just preferred of course.

And no, I want to make things simple. just one tag. stupa/chedi was not meant as distinction, it was meant as being the same, after all, its the same. pagoda is somewhat different, it does have a well defined description. Confusing is only the probably from colonial times confusing use of pagoda also for stupas, such as the shedagon pagoda in yangoon,

I totally agree that one should not make it complicated like your road example, my idea was exactly to make it simple.
As to the different shapes of stupas, I think this does not matter, a stupa is a stupa, no matter how it looks. Like a museum, no matter whether it looks like the guggenheim, or the hermitage. Or a church, no matter if it looks like the munster in Ulm, or is little more than a little boat house (http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2435)

the list of
“Monument? Memorial? Place_of_worship?” was meat, as choice. Could one agree on one of these as a single solution?
So
a) Monument
b) Memorial
c) Place of _worship

d) A new stupa tag

edit:
e) other suggestions

perhaps this should be taken out into a new thread to all read it…, or make it also broader (other countries), as suggested

@Endless,

I repeat again, no it is not possible to agree upon choosing one of those as a “single solution” because there is no single solution.

If I come to a normal temple with a normal Stupa (because I can’t tell the difference between them), which tag should be the first that comes to mind when I want to tag it? I don’t care much about this whole discussion, I just want to go out into the world and start tagging Stupas.

Don’t take this in a provocative way, but I think there could be a standard for how we generally tag Stupas unless they are clearly special (e.g. a monument).

I think it’s a fairly straight forward tagging situation. I tag the place_of_worship using either a closed way or node as appropriate, then I tag the stupa as a node or closed way with man_made=tower and tower:type=stupa. In other words I’m tagging the stupa as a structure only and not ascribing any other significance to it. If it sits atop or is part of a place_of_worship, or a monument, so be it. Use a node or a closed way for either, or both, structures. The two major tags are not mutually exclusive because at top level one is an amenity and the other is man_made.

I’m in the process of working out a Garmin icon for stupa with the Lambertus folks. Hopefully we will end up with something for OSM as well.

I think it’s a fairly straight forward tagging situation. I tag the place_of_worship using either a closed way or node as appropriate, then I tag the stupa as a node or closed way with man_made=tower and tower:type=stupa. In other words I’m tagging the stupa as a structure only and not ascribing any other significance to it. If it sits atop or is part of a place_of_worship, or a monument, so be it. Use a node or a closed way for either, or both, structures. The two major tags are not mutually exclusive because at top level one is an amenity and the other is man_made.

I’m in the process of working out a Garmin icon for stupa with the Lambertus folks. Hopefully we will end up with something for OSM as well.

Sounds great, and thanks for the answer.

I am confused. So, on the one hand you say there is not consensus to tag stupas, on the other hand, what you basically say is that all should be labeled now as tower-stupas, even though we have established that many are not.

Now, if other stupas are labeled differently, e.g. all the ones labeled as monument-stupa, will they also render properly with the Garmin icon? If not, shouldn’t we as community decide on a single way of tagging stupas so they all render appropriately?

monument=stupa is used 91 times on a single site, the Erdene Zuu Monastery
47.2015302, 102.8432013
and then at only three more places in Cambodia. So in total used at four sites.

tower:type=stupa is more widespread and used by more people.

Given that with the bell towers we have a similar concept already I’m in slight favor of the tower:type tagging.

Did you already ask for input at a wider audience on the tagging list?

Given that stupa is not used that much yet, I think there is still time to arrive at a consensus. I thought indeed the idea was to get a consensus from a wider audience. Given we have already non-intuitive tags, it seemed to me that one should try to avoid that. I have outlined above - I can summarize again if desired - why I think tower is such a good idea for stupa since many are not towers.

Bell tower may seem like a similar concept, but it is actually derived from real towers, hence natural.

Sometimes there is no consensus.
It’s because OSM is a living system of tagging habits.

It changes, develops and evolves.

See the way to tag addresses and house numbers. There existed different strategies to do so. Or public transport.

And there is not “a single ruler” in OSM to make final decisions.

If you’re looking for strict tagging rules, maybe OSM is not the right place for you. Did you have a look at Google’s Map Maker?

Jo brought in another aspect regarding chedis.

She would like to distinguish these still actively “used”, usually located in a temple and the more “historic” ones just being there as you won’t tear them down.

I think I had tagged the later ones historic=ruins. Not sure it’s the best way to do. If you can come up with a better way of tagging, please do so.

Well, perhaps in a way you are right that something like MapMaker might be what I’m looking for. On the other hand, the reason I went now with OSM is that one can download the maps without constantly being connect to some network, that’s really the attraction - an open source map.

Still, there seems to be sort of a split personality, on the one hand people discuss and agree, and other, everybody can do what they want… Ok, it’s exaggerated, but I guess you get my gist. I’m not looking for a big navtec document, but a few more guidelines, that can also help newcomers, wouldn’t that be useful?

Yes, I have been thinking about this as well as you can see in some of my points above. Have to look at the latest status of “ruin”.

ok, it seems there are basically two ways of doing it, not clear if the proposal went ahead.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/ruins
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features

so, you can have ruins=castle
or you can have historic=castle, ruins=yes

the ruins yes/no is used in other situations as well, e.g. windmills i.e. man_made=windmill, ruins=yes

The latter would of course allow description of pretty much anything as I sort of was contemplating above already

i.e.
man_made=temple, ruins=yes not clear what is better, needs some more thought.

So, you’re proposing adding a new man_made=temple tag?

I like the ruins=yes tag because it allows one to tag any ruins regardless of historical value, about which a casual mapper might not be aware. I’m not sure how it affects the tower:type=stupa discussion, however.

No definite proposal yet, just thinking out loud, seems still ongoing discussions perhaps. But in any case,
yes, the ruins=yes does sound good, because it could potentially be attached to building.

as to stupa, yes, it’s off a tangent a bit, on the other hand, stupa could be just a part of the whole framework of how to label wats/temples/palaces and their ruined variants.

One has to cover Mon/Dvaravati, Khmer, and the Thai historical periods for that. Periods before that, e.g. Ban Chiang, Ban Prasat, etc. can be covered with the archeological tags.