I see no problem with tagging an area with just landcover, in case you do not know for which purpose it is used by nature or humans.
Another mapper can later always add that information. So I do not understand why you write “non-functional” mapping.
This is the same as mapping highway=road from aerial imagery when you do not know the importance of the street. There is a street and another mapper can later add more detail.
I’m with Alester, the top level tags are just classifications. Not every amenity is really an amenity (prison and bank), not everything under natural is untouched by humans (tree row), not everything that is made by humans is under man-made (otherwise most objects just have a man-made tag), not every landuse describes how the area is used by humans (grass ? forest ?) Why is a restaurant not under tourism ? etc.
Do not try to get too much information from the “top”-level tag. BTW, what is a top-level tag ? Why is building a top-level tag ? shouldn’t it be man_made=building; building=… ?
Exactly. They’re just tags. They might offer a bit of guidance as to roughly want sort of thing the thing being tagged is, but at the end of the day it’s just a tag - it doesn’t matter if OSM had chosen the tag “landcover”, “landuse” “1234” or “fintlewoodlewix”, as long as OSMers understand that when they tag something as “foo”=“bar” that they’re describing the same thing.
Landcover=(coastal) dunes should also be a good ‘replacement’ for all those dunes on beaches, because natural=dune(s) is not even rendered, and because it is not rendered, people ‘fill in’ those dune-area’s (usually) with natural=heath, and that is something TOTALLY DIFFERENT than dunes …
WHEN is that landcover=* going to be rendered ???
This seems like something that should be discussed first before redefining the tag. The article for natural=dune (note: singular) makes it clear that the tag is used only for single dunes, not areas of multiple dunes.
I’m not so concerned about the actual word that’s used. I’m more concerned about changing the meaning of the tag. natural=scrub says:
…so there’s no problem with using it to tag an area of bushes, even though the word used is singular.
On the other hand, natural=dune says:
In this case, recommending that it be used for tagging an area covered with dunes would be changing the meaning of the tag. Such a change should be discussed with a wider audience.
I’m a native English speaker and I use scrub as a term for this all the time: it’s pretty much the state of art term used by professional ecologists in Britain. Scrub as a verb largely refers to cleaning things vigorously. Shrubs are types of plants (microphanerophytes) not a habitat type, see Shrubland on Wikipedia for this and other similar words.
Rather more importantly, natural=scrub has been used on OSM for nigh on 15 years and therefore has a well-established semantic of its own irrespective of its original relationship to the normal meaning in English.
Land form not land cover.
Dunes are not land covers but land forms, like hills and valleys, they have a shape.
Natural not just ‘natural’ but also ‘unnatural’. The key natural is, in OSM, used with both natural things and unnatural things. If, like me, you object to this misuse of the English language then dual tag. For things that are land covers use the key landcover for things that are landforms use the key landform. Unfortunately you may have to use the key natural for rendering.
Rendering
If something needs to be rendered now then select something that is already being rendered that it a fair fit. For ‘sand dunes’ I would use natural=sand (it is a landcover tag) but I would also tag it landform=dune for accuracy and probably landcover=sand for complete accuracy!
Edit : i made those, but (as usual) they labeled it for deletion, so my ‘contribution’ of Tag:landform=dune(s) shall probably also not be accepted … well … so long then with that ‘natural’, that actually NO natural is … and by the way ; i am curious about those ricefields-plateaus (which are a landform)from the picture beneath here, how to tag them ?
Of course not.
There is little use of the key landform. And it is not documented well. I’ll start a table to demonstrate OSM usage.
Suggest you help by adding to the table using values from taginfo.
Think I have now added a few of these tags to some of my local dunes, together with natural=dune. Note the tag landform=erg!
They are farm fields that produce rice … so tags to use?
landuse=farmland (renders)
produce=rice (no rendering)
crop=rice (no rendering) - I don’t like this tag … it is a sub set of the above produce tag, but has greater numbers in the data base, I prefer to use my brains that rely on frequency of use.
You can do each field individually so it looks good, or be lazy and just combine them into one large area - that doe get the rought message across.
I would suggest to add new tags in the proposal space of the wiki. This way you won’t have trouble with people deleting them. The key and tag definition pages are for established tags. If you’re unsure about the acceptance of tags and their definition, you could write here or on the tagging mailing list to gather comments and opinions, so you can decide whether it seems acceptable to set up a new page.
If you want to persuade people to accept your point of view you have to engage with them and discuss things with them. If you’re not willing to do that, you shouldn’t be surprised when people don’t understand what you’re trying to do.
The point Mateusz was making was that the pages you created didn’t have any OSM-related content. There was no description of how the tag is used, what other related tags could be used, no Taginfo box showing the amount of usage, etc. You didn’t even have a link to the higher-level tag (e.g. tower:type). All you had was a dictionary definition, which doesn’t help anyone with mapping. We aren’t duplicating Wikipedia in this wiki; we’re documenting how tags are used in the OSM database.
OK, tnx for clearing that up … but it seems that some kind of Internal error(Fatal exception of type “Error” ) has happened in the links from above … and i am not involved in that …
