On 15.04.2016 10:15, Andy Townsend wrote:
On 15/04/2016 08:24, Oleksiy Muzalyev wrote:
Google search of "radio mast", "radio tower", "television mast",
"television tower", etc. gives each millions of results with similar
images. It seems that the words "mast" and "tower" are
interchangeable. The article in English Wikipedia is called: "Radio
masts and towers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_masts_and_towers
At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, the English* word "mast"
(as in "radio mast") is an adaptation of "mast" as in "the big pointy
thing on ships that you hang the sails off". It's recent - there have
only been radio masts for 100 years or so.
There is a sense (noted from an engineering point of view in your
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_masts_and_towers) that a "mast" is
not self-supporting but that a "tower" is, but there's certainly
popular crossover usage of the two terms - see for example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emley_Moor_transmitting_station. I
drive past that every week, and if asked what it was called would
probably say "Emley Moor mast" but if asked whether it was a mast or a
tower would probably say "tower". Also a ship's mast is usually
self-supporting.
Also, please don't say things like "... and it is not rendered on the
OSM map at all". What you mean is "not rendered on one of the layers
on the osm.org site, which is widely used by OSM mappers but hardly at
all by anyone else". Most people see OSM data either in an app on
their phone, on a third-party website for e.g. a pizza company, or on
a board outside the supermarket saying where other local facilities
are. None of these show what you call "the OSM map".
It'd be nice if OSM could decide what the difference between a mast, a
tower and a communications tower was and start mapping accordingly.
The nearest thing to a sane discussion on this was on the OSM Carto
map style's github rather than somewhere like the tagging list;
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made%3Dmast#First_question:_Is_it_a_mast_or_a_tower.3F
is positively unhelpful. However it's not the end of the world - if
people map "big pointy thing" using one of any number of OSM tags then
most maps using OSM data are free to display "big pointy thing" any
way they like, if they feel it's appropriate.
Cheers,
Andy
* I'm using British (actually English) English throughout here. Other
variants are available.
_______________________________________________
dev mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Hi Andy,
Thank you for your comment.
I think it is difficult to render man_made=tower with an icon because
there are absolutely different types of towers on the land: Fortified
tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortified_tower , Observation tower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observation_tower , etc.
But sailing ships are not so often placed on the land, so basically
man_made=mast on the land has got less ambiguous meaning. I am trying to
find a logic behind the fact that man_made=mast;tower:type=communication
is rendered with an excellent icon on the default layer of the osm.org
website, and man_made=tower;tower:type=communication is not.
A communication tower (or mast) is not only a "big pointy thing". It has
got also an invisible ever-growing significance, as more and more people
get mobile devices, its electromagnetic emissions, an so on.
Best regards,
Oleksiy
_______________________________________________
dev mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
