Why are mappers using landuse=village_green in the wrong way?

More than once in the past few years have I started and participated in various topics on the tagginglist (as well as on the local Dutch forum) where the precise use of the landuse=village_green was discussed.
A Village Green is a situation that is described in the wiki, and I quote:

“… is a distinctive part of a village centre. It’s an area of common land, usually grass but often including flowers, shrubs, small trees and a pond, located in the centre of a village (quintessentially English - defined separately from ‘common land’ under the Commons Registration Act 1965 and the Commons Act 2006).”

The proposal (in 2006) and the final voting (two in favor and none against!) never reached a wide audience (which back in 2006 of course was much smaller than nowadays) so nobody outside the UK really knew or understood its meaning and specific use.

The following text is partly copied from my posting on the tagging list:

Because I found out that the tag is greatly misused, I did an extended research to get more details about its current use.
My research is based on the OSM dataset of 14 july 2019.

The total number of tags for landuse=village_green is: 91645
I then took a selection of 22 countries (see table at end) and compared the uses per country to its use in the UK, because that country seems to be the main reason for the existence of this tag.
In those 22 countries the tag is used 55721 times and there are 5569 unique mappers responsible for using it.
I was surprised to see that in the country where I live, the Netherlands, the tag was used 260% more than in the UK!
Given the original definition you could expect that in the Netherlands (based on the number of cities/towns/villages and assuming that each of those indeed had a Village Green - which isn’t true) there could be at most 2440 Village Greens, not the 5131 we have now. Where, then, are the 2691 others located??

… See full entry

What shall we have for diner tonight?

### Improving the OSM map - why don’t we (14)

Some thoughts on restaurant and food-tagging on OSM.

A restaurant is considered an amenity and tagged with amenity=restaurant.
One would expect that in order to show what type of restaurant this is, or what food you can eat there, the next step would be:
restaurant=italian
restaurant=fish
restaurant=burger
After all, this is accepted:
natural=water
water=lake
But, alas, OSM is differently and so a new tagging was introduced to indicate what we can eat in a restaurant. No, they didn’t choose: food=* , but came up with:
cuisine=*
So, the correct tagging for a restaurant and what is served inside is:
amenity=restaurant
cuisine=italian
This is not so bad at all, because this scheme allows you to tag many more places where you can eat, but which are not considered a restaurant, like a cafe, bar or pub (or a railway station or book shop).
There are some curious constructions however, because to tag a Burger King (or any other fast food restaurant) you can do so in two ways:
amenity=restaurant
cuisine=burger
or:
amenity=fast_food
cuisine=burger
By itself, using fast_food as a value for an amenity is rather strange, because to me, fast food is a type of food, belonging to cuisine, not an amenity! (Would you use highway=asphalt? No, of course not, because highway=** expects a function of the highway it describes, not its surface).
The addition of the cuisine= in the last case is maybe not even necessary, as hamburgers are core business in any fast food restaurant.
Over the years the list of values to assign to the cuisine key has grown (and will keep to do so) and now (february 2017) we have two basic groups in the wiki:

• 40 values for the type of food (like fish, meat, pizza, burger, kebab, soup, etc.)
• 53 values for the ethnicity of the food (like italian, greek, chinese, mexican, etc.)

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The fixme=* tag is often used to give other mappers an indication that something needs more research (or it is a “note to self”) .
All too often it stays at that point and no one ever cares any more about such a request for improvement. I found out that roughly more than half of the fixme’s is at least 2 years old.

I wrote a simple overpass query with some stylesheets attached which shows the text of the fixme immediately on the map.
Click on the link above, locate the map to your neighbourhood and hit the run button.
Is there something you can fix? Please do so and remove the “fixme”

For the centre of London, this is the result:
(this screenshot is from 2016, most likely it is different when you look it up now!)

The overpass query searches for nodes with a fixme=, but you can easily change it to finding ways instead.
And if you want to locate all note= tagging, simply replace “fixme” with “note” in the script.

A year ago we started a program were new mappers - after they did their first edit in The Netherlands - received a welcome message with links to various sources of information on the mapping process, the do’s and don’t’s, the editors and other useful stuff.
I was the initiator of that program and also the one responsible for finding the new mappers ([Pascal Neis provided the necessary RSS feed) and sending the messages. As such it was a one-man job.

After one year and sending more than 1500 individual messages to those new mappers, I will no longer continue with this program.

Why?

1. In my earlier diary-entry on this program some (statistical) conclusions were drawn about the number of mappers and the amount of mapping activity over time. There seems to be no change to this statistical data since that report. But I did not expect to happen that either. Research from others points in the same direction as can be learned from the reactions to that first article.

2. About 75 persons (0.4%) replied to my welcome-message, mostly with a simple “thank you”, sometimes asking for more information. A very small number of people joined (and stayed in) the active mapper group, but most of the new mappers are “one-time-only” mappers. [1]◊

3. After maps.me [2]◊ became available as a simpe data editor for OSM, a great number of people entered the OSM mappers world [3]◊, but most of them are not aware of the underlying principles and goals of OSM, nor are they aware of the communicating chanels we have (mailing list and forum). Hence, sending a message to those mappers is rather useless because they are not aware of the fact that there is such a thing as a private mail-box in their account. This became the more problematic as a lot of tourists are now acting as “mappers”, but given their limited knowledge of mapping and the limited possibilities of maps.me, those edits very often need the hand of an experienced mapper to fix. [4]◊

… See full entry

This week one of the OSM mappers will be a lucky one:
he/she will find out that the 40 000 000th changeset carries her/his name!
Will there be a party?

At the moment I post this, there are some 30 000 changesets to go!

Improving the OSM map - why don’t we? (13)

### Why so many people are not using OSM. Do you recognize the renderer that was used for the above screenshot? I’m pretty sure you can’t. Because it wasn’t rendered but printed in the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World.
Looking at this map, it is clear (at least to people who are familiar with “paper” maps [1]) what we see:
* A number of Islands that have a name as a group (Canary Islands) that are part of mainland Spain
* Each Island has its own name (printed in italics or bold italics)
* Each Island has a capital (printed in bold, but this is not true for all the Canary Islands)
* A number of towns is printed in normal type

… See full entry

Trying to improve the commitment of new mappers and to help them overcome the obvious beginners problems when trying to map, the Dutch community (after discussion in the user-forum) started to welcome new mappers as soon as they had made their first edit (in the Netherlands) on the map. To find out who the new mappers were, I used this rss-feed, provided by Pascal Neis.
This welcome program started on the 1st of August of 2015 and continues to this day. It is run by me and as such is a one-man task.
During this process I became curious to the mapping behaviour of the mappers and started to collect some data about their activity:

• when did they start their user account?
• when did they start to map?
• how many edits did they do?
• and much more

Soon I realized that I needed more data (over a longer time span) to get a better insight and so I contacted Pascal Neis and asked him to provide me with the relevant data, dating from some years back. After some startup problems with the data - not all the mappers seemed to be present in the data - I started my research with a dataset that contained the following data:

• userID
• username
• date of registration
• date of first edit in the Netherlands
• date of their latest edit
• number of changesets

First results

The dataset I have used for my research contained 3205 mappers that have done a first edit in the Netherlands between 1-1-2014 and 29-1-2016.

On first inspection of the data, it surprised me to see that some mappers did their first edit 7 years after they had created an account! This, then, was the first thing to investigate: how many days (after registration) pass before the first changeset is created?
Next I investigated how many days passed before the mapper did his latest (and very often his last) edit.

… See full entry

What or who is our source?

When we map, we use something (or someone) to base our mapping on. Preferably in such a way that other mappers can verify what we added to the map.
To help with that task, we are requested to add a source=* tag to whatever we put on the map.
What are the most frequent used sources on OSM?
The top 3 (all used more than 10 000 000 times):
1. BAG - 18 840 435
2. cadastre-dgi-fr - 12 150 135
3. Bing - 10 695 411
You can see the full list on taginfo yourself.

The BAG is a large import of all buildings in the Netherlands. wiki is here.
In France the same was done. wiki is here.
Do I have to explain Bing?

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Do we all speak the same language? Should we?

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This is a perfect example of our first rule, “map what is on the ground”: .

You can find it here:

… See full entry

What do we do when a diary entry is obvious pure spam? Is there a way to block such a user?

Fix the fixme/FIXME/FixMe/Fixme/Fixme: !!

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Because it is difficult?

In my previous diary entry I showed you some of the problems that I see with the amount of keys in use for the tagging of objects in OSM (54382 at the time of my research: 25 july 2015).
In a reaction I got from user Hedaja he pointed to an interesting blog I wasn’t aware of, by the maintainer of the Taginfo database, Jochen Topf.
Jochen - in this blog - also mentions the “one-time-only” use of keys and calls for action in an attempt to lower the number of keys back to a healthy 40.000.

I did some research and I downloaded the taginfo database on 25 july 2015.
It has a table “keys” with 54382 keys that I used for the next statistics.

• 19037 keys appear just once - which is 35% of all the keys;
• 27731 keys appear at most 3 times - 50%; (note: this includes the keys above!)
• 35453 keys appear at most 10 times - 65%; (including keys above!)

I consider keys used 10 or less times suspect of some mistake in the use of the key (e.g. wrong spelling of a regular key).

Lets consider any key that is used 10.000 or more times a “trusted” key. How many are there?

• 1292 keys appear 10.000 or more times - 2.4%

In between we have a group of 17.516 keys that are used between 11 and 9999 times.

By itself all those numbers do not mean very much because what counts more is what value the key has. A key that is used once can only have one value. E.g. the key “nitrox” is a one-time-only key and it can be found here.
A key that is used twice can have at most 2 different vallues and a key that is used 100 times can have at most 100 different values. The key that is used most on OSM is the key: source, it appears 162.428.193 times with 143.491 different values (one of them is Bing and another is bing).

… See full entry

Where do we leave our Garbage?

Taginfo is a great tool to see where and how a given key is used on the map. It also gives you some nicely formatted tables with statistical data of all the tags (a tag is a key=value pair).
Did you know that the most used key is source=*?
On 25 july 2015 it appeared 162.428.193 times with a total of 143.491 different values. You can find the most common tags here.

… See full entry

How do we deal with multiple values for a key?

We all know this situation: you need to add a telephone number to a node and add the line:
phone=00311198765432
Then you find out that there is a second phone number for that node, but you can’t add a second phone= tag because OSM doesn’t allow that.
The general question is: how do I tag multiple values for one key?
Let’s investigate how mappers have solved that problem sofar. The screenshots all are made with OpenPoiMap.

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[1]
This example is the Eiffel tower in Paris for which four architects worked together, but only one gave his name to the final product!
In the source the names are separated with semicolons:
Stephen Sauvestre;Gustave Eiffel;Maurice Koechlin;Émile Nouguier

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Redundant or weird tagging?

Sometimes we have to tag a shop without knowing what kind of shop it is. Then we use: shop=yes.
If you know the shop is a clothes shop, then shop=clothes would suffice. Using amenity=shop as in the example below is not encouraged: My advice is to clean-up such tags whenever you encounter them.

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How to use Notes?

Whenever we tag something there are a lot of key=value pairs we can choose from. One of them is the note key. With openpoimap I was investigating the use of this tag. Below you see a screenshot of Berlin with the note’s that were made on a great number of nodes.

IMHO the use of a note is twofold:

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Bits and Pieces

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How useful is a tag that exists only once?

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Do we tag what something is not, has not, or what?

Part 2 in a series of comments on the current mapping problems and curiosities that I encounter with OSM.
Look at this Bicycle Repair Station: Can I safely assume that:

• service:bicycle:truing_stand=yes?
• service:bicycle:freewheel_removers=yes?
• service:bicycle:dishing_tool=yes?
• service:bicycle:headset_cup_remover=yes?
• service:bicycle:cartridge_bottom_bracket_tool=yes?
• service:bicycle:simple_headset_press=yes?
• service:bicycle:metric_taps=yes?

at the University of San Francisco Bicycle Repair Station?
Any decent Bicycle Repair Station without a chain tool should not be allowed to carry that name!
Imagine this:
leisure=swimming_pool
swimming_pool:water=no
Or this:
tourism=hotel
hotel:number_of_beds=0

So please, when you tag, think first!

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… See full entry