Talk:Key:landuse/Archive 1

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Inconsistent

The beginning of the article goes to great lengths to argue that landuse=park is inappropriate, but we have landuse=cemetery later in the article. In fact, the summary seems to be at odds with how the landuse tag is being used: What's the appropriate way to tag the farmland associated with a single farm? I'm sure most people would use landuse=farm, and I'm not aware of an alternative. Robx 12:24, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

yes, i put that there, removed now. i'm concerned that landuse is being used as a dumping ground for any random tag tht doesn't fit well elsewhere, with the consequence that the tags under it become horribly inconsistent, with no real common theme. more discussion is needed Myfanwy 19:34, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
The original intention was that landuse was exactly that, ie what use the land is being put to. At the start I only saw two land area tags, natural=to cover land that has not been worked or landuse= for land that has. Farmland would fall under the landuse tag whereas uncultivated (historically) land would not. blackadder 19:35, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
great, that makes sense. there are several landuse tags that continue to make a lot of sense in a similar way (i.e. they are consistent), such as residential, commercial, retail, industrial. These appear consistent, as they can be used as a general description for an area of land occupied by many different entities.
However, we then get into the not so consistent usage, such as cemetery, quarry, forest, military, reservoir,..... and so on. As far as i can see, these are no longer general descriptions for an area, but are far more specific, and deserve to be elsewhere. Put it another way: the landuse tags appear to be a way of saying "i'm not going to map every entity in this area, it's too complicated/of no value - instead, i'm going to map one big piece of land, encompassing them all and tag it with a general tag which sums up which each of them do". problem is, we have a lot of tags that can map each individual entity, which is very inconsistent. a general overview of what landuse is for would help tag proposal discussions no end, as it would mean we could refer back to it when we create a new tag Myfanwy 00:22, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
I think we'd want to keep landuse=residential even in areas where every single house and every single lot has been mapped. Robx 11:09, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
what for? when every residential property is tagged, the sum of all those areas will be exactly the same as the previously tagged landuse area. we will be tagging one area of land twice, with two tags with the same information stored in them Myfanwy 22:49, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
Because not every application of our data is interested in the same level of detail. Generating a landuse=residential polygon for say a zoom 12 tile from individual buildings and lots is needlessly complicated. Even at the same zoom level a map for e.g. a real estate agent and one for canal boaters will probably be rendered with different details. Besides most likely the landuse polygon is drawn long before all the details and would still be in the database, but just not visible to normal queries. --Cartinus 05:34, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

I think that landuse=military is an appropriate use of the landuse tag.

well, we can easily tag any military item with a more specific tag. they are generally one of : firing range, naval base, air base, arms dump, etc., etc. landuse looks to have been initially created where we don't know/can't find out what's there. could you go into more detail why you think military is appropriate? can you give an example that does not fit in an existing military= tag, or that cannot have one created? Myfanwy 22:47, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

I agree that landuse has been abused as a generic area-tag. How about extending Key:area to allow arbitrary values that don't fit anywhere else? That way when people want to tag an area for which no appropriate category exist, they'd just put in an area=my_new_type_of_area. Then by analyzing what area= has been used for, we might find other sensible categories.

i see what you're getting at, but really there's no reason why we can't come up with a tag for everything that's significant enough to tag, either by slightly expanding (in a consistent way) an existing tag, or creating one new. there should be no generic areas without an appropriate category. can you think of any? Myfanwy 22:47, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
sorry, i didn't read your item properly first time. yes, this is a good way of discovering new tags, you're right, whether the tag comes before the use or not isn't too important. i think this is how a lot of mappers work. the key now is to get the information out of planet and into the tag proposals system. i've been looking at tagwatch recently, and have been toying with using that to manually seed the new 'proposed features' page Myfanwy 00:21, 4 February 2008 (UTC)


My understanding of landuse= and natural= is that we should be able to cover the whole map with these. The area covered by a motorway might be tagged as landuse=transportation. In that case, what should a cemetery fall under? Robx 11:09, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

my understanding of landuse is "to categorise the general use of an area of land" i.e. if an area of land is 90% houses, it gets tagged landuse=residential, even if there is a small shop in the area, a church, a park, a small cemetery or whatever. the cemetery (amenity=cemetery) would then be tagged separately, on top of the landuse tag, as would the church, the park and the shop Myfanwy 22:47, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
you're right i think about the motorway though, there should probably be something similar to landuse=railway . in case you're wondering, i consider landuse=railway to be valid, as railway land is often hard to tag more specifically; there is often little demarcation between separate areas (sidings, general rail corridor, marshalling yards, maintenance areas). plus of course it's generally illegal to trespass on it, and very dangerous, which makes it hard to map Myfanwy 00:25, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
To me this sounds inconsistent. All those separate entities on the railway land are owned by a single company. Most often the whole area is fenced with a single fence too. Just like the cemetery consists of lots of separate items (burial plots, walk ways, contemplation building, gardeners shed, flower kiosk) managed by a single entity (local council or religious organisation). So to me it is not strange to find them in the same category. --Cartinus 06:46, 9 February 2008 (UTC)


maybe we should be considering replacing landuse with council zoning regions? most cities will have areas where certain activities are allowed, e.g. retail, residential, industrial, etc. and certain areas where they are not Myfanwy 22:47, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Having to look up something basic like this at your local council hall sounds way to complicated/official to me for a map that is supposed to be made by average geeks who are walking/riding/driving around with their GPS and just observing what they see. --Cartinus 06:46, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
If we would do this, then I think you'll loose the discussion at the surface mine proposal. I'm pretty sure most countries have a separate zoning category for that. --Cartinus 07:19, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Rendering issues

Is it correct to map the whole of a town as landuse'd residential. This was done recently on one of my local towns -- but unfortunately, osmarender doesn't see landuse as a "meta-layer", and treated implicitly as layer "0" -- which meant that overnight all of the tunnels disappeared from the map that were (correctly) mapped as layer "-1". Hopefully, retagging the landuse area as place="town" should cure this, but keep the spirit of the tagging.

Rendering landuse=vineyard

In the Proposed features/orchard, there is a begining of a set of patterns for landuse=orchard, with an alterntive proposal for the landuse=vineyard. FrViPofm 09:49, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Total mess --> landuse=garages

Urgent cleanup needed for to feature desciption. Please see dicussion Talk:Tag:landuse=garages

--EinKonstanzer (talk) 22:16, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia definition

we shouldn't necessarily take wp as gospel, but they have some interesting info on landuse, particularly how it relates to council zoning and regulations.
[1]

Resolved: Nothing actionable here Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 05:45, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Landuse Aerodrome

I think we should have a landuse=aerodrome tag. current, heathrow is tagged as landuse=apron, but i think that is only for parking planes. Not the huge grassy fields surrounding the taxiways and so on. I have seen aerodromes tagged with landuse=industrial or landuse=village_green as well, so i think we shoud sort this out. GercoKees 11:17, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be simpler to extend the use of aeroway=aerodrome from only points to points and areas? Then it would be the same as the similar military=airfield. --Cartinus 00:36, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
Definitely. We should certainly do this. --Hawke 23:12, 19 March 2008 (UTC)


Resolved: dead old proposal Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 06:05, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Landuse on nodes

Can landuse be used on nodes? Table says it can be used while infobox says it can't. There are about 5000 nodes with landuse tag in planet.osm. While most of them appear to be mistakes, sometimes they make sense (like landuse=quarry for very small quarries). --Jttt 16:14, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Who made the information for use on nodes in the table? This is very arbitrary for me! E.g. it is allowed with "grass" or "greenfield", not with "cemetery" or "depot". I think we should allow it everywhere, (although in most cases it is not desirable). And on data items it is done differently and stated everywhere as ineligible, causes mismatching. --Chris2map (talk) 08:36, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

    • Mapping cemeteries as nodes in case of being unable to map geometries is 100% fine, feel free to fix this. Mapping grass as nodes seems quite dubious, but nothing terrible. "And on data items it is done differently and stated everywhere as ineligible" - including areas? Then data items are wrong as usual (I generally ignore data items due to dysfunctional watchlist support) Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 15:05, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
On data items not everything is ineligible, but the use on nodes. I'm going to change it in cases where it is used or it can make sense IMO. --Chris2map (talk) 19:28, 10 May 2020 (UTC)


Resolved: Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 06:05, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Cities and landuse

I recently saw some towns around my area where landuse = residential has been used even though all streets have been mapped already. I once read that landuse = residential is only used if there is nothing mapped yet. So now I don't know how the project is handling this issue. Does the landuse stay even if you have a quite decent map about the town or will landuse be deleted once the town is been mapped?

Landuse should stay once a town has all streets mapped. How else would you differentiate between residential/commercial/industrial areas (or even forests and farms in a more suburban/rural setting). Whoever wrote what you remember might have been writing about the use of landuse=residential/layer=-1 that is used by some to designate whole towns at once. --Cartinus 23:28, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
Landuse sholud stay once a town has all streets mapped if the information is detailed. There's no point in having a large closed way enclosing the whole of a village or of a town tagged landuse=residential, name=TownName. --SimoneSVC (talk) 13:45, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Resolved: Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 06:04, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Near worldwide coverage?

If I understand correctly, it seems that together, landuse and natural tags should cover nearly the entire planet's (land) surface.

I can get on board with that, but it looks to me that today, less than a tenth of one percent of the world's land area is currently covered with either of these. What's the best way to proceed with mapping these features? Should any attempt be made to apply this information evenly, or is it acceptable to have isolated regions with extensive landuse/natural area coverage? This might look a little goofy at low zoom, unless the renderers use fainter colors for these areas at lower zoom levels. Should I even be concerned with such a monumental task, or is it generally considered a low priority? Vid the Kid 23:18, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

See Land use and areas of natural land for more description and open questions on this topic -- Harry Wood 14:36, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
It is 100% fine to have landuse mapped in one place and not another, mapping all landuse worldwide in one edit is not feasible so we do it part by part like with other data Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 05:51, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
Resolved: one more case of uneven data quality Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 05:51, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Leisure=Red_Light_District

Need a new laduse tag leisure=Red_Light_District to describe both legaland non-legal areas of prostitution. This includes such high profile areas as Hamburg's Reeperbahn, London's Soho and the 'Wallen' in central Amsterdam.

i would use "commercial" --Flaimo 10:45, 29 May 2011 (BST)
Yes, landuse=commercial + amenity=brothel for individual objects are sufficient Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 11:41, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
Resolved: Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 05:49, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

"landuse=commercial" questionable for government facilities grouping several properties and buildings

This is described for offices, but there are cases where there are offices but absolutely no commercial services offered.

  • These are for public services, local authorities and adminsitrations, ministries/departments, social and community centers, possibly also some public leisures, academic institutions, and adminsitrations of schools/universities/research centers, business development without any teaching (so cannot be classified as a "school" or university) and other local offices of national/state agencies.
  • This is also not maching with the "mixed" development type, as there's no residence, no industries.
  • These offices frequently also have no access to the general public. It cannot be made "landuse=military" as there's no military activity.

Shouldn't we have a tag such as landuse=administrative or landuse=government (including local goverment) plus a operator=* to indicate who manages it (and possibly admin_level=* if this is a facility of an national or local government council, or country-specific tags such as admin_type:FR=* for some subtypes such as "academy", "ministry", "agency", "local_authority", "courthouse"...) ?

Note: this is not a "boundary" but we cannot use "commercial" here even if these are primarily offices (there may be some internal residences for their personals), as technically they are part of one or more administrative boundaries (some areas for government offices are spanning an area covering multiple municipalities) which is still competent there, and may have only offered a delegation and still owns the terrains on which these government facilities are installed. As the executive government agencies and adminsitrations are constantly changing, they may be reclaimed by the municipalities or used for other public services such as community centers, social security, tax offices, police, civic centers, information centers.

These areas may be partly open to the public.

See also: #landuse=institutional above.
See also: Proposed features/Civic admin
See also: amenity=* (but they are usually smaller entities and open to the public, unlike most administrative facilities: you may have an amenity for the courthouse, within a larger area with internal offices, such as archiving or accounting services, or even restaurants for the personnals only, or maintenance services, or IT departments)

Similar problem with prisons/jails, currently mapped erroneously as landuse=military when they are in fact jails of the civil justice administration (military jails and courts have disappeared in many democratic countries, military affairs may be judged and executed by the civil authorities with special provisions only for instruction and public audiences when there are military secrets, but this is not different from other protected secrets such as courts for minors or many civil or commercial courts where the public is limited to special authorizations or secret agreement for the resolution of affairs; this is only a question of procedures and the publioc or journalists may still have an access to the trials and to control how court orders are executed and in which conditions).

Same problems with buildings/areas used by offices of diplomatic representations (extraterritoriality, but still legally within the sovereignty of the national authorities and with some competences for the local authorities to be informed at least or receive compensations from the national goverment granting the extraterritoriality for the temporary benefit of another country), and international organizations (sometimes operating under special treaty or agreements), or internally by a religious administration (without any local cult celebration for the public), or air/maritime transportation regulation, which are not really "commercial", or storage areas for public museums, or sportive federations (not really public but still not "business"), other regulators/ombudsman authorities, and professional chambers (private courts in specific domains)...

Some problems with other "no man's lands" with extremely regulated accesses (not necessarily military, but may be protected by armies, such as nuclear power facilities and exclusion zones in contaminated areas or in case of severe industrial or environmental risks, or international areas of airports/harbours that are closed by customs/police control).

— Verdy_p (talk) 01:36, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

Resolved: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User_talk:Verdy_p#Blocked Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 05:48, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Status

In 2016 the status of Key:landuse was set to "in use". Shouldn't we set it to "de facto"? – Or is it appropriate to set to "approved", because several values or tags have been introduced by accepted proposals (landuse=construction, landuse=farmyard, landuse=railway, landuse=port, landuse=garages)? --Chris2map (talk) 12:23, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

Should be resolved now Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 16:33, 28 June 2020 (UTC)


Resolved: de facto seems the closest one and is set for a long timeMateusz Konieczny (talk) 05:47, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
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