On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 12:14 AM, St Niklaas <[email protected]> wrote: > Since the hut is situated in Australia, why name it Alpine hut ? I always > thought the Alps to be a European mountain range. In rural uninhabited areas > there will be shelters like it all over the world.
Yeah, that's a bit messy. In Australia "Alps" means the Australian Alps, and "alpine" generally means anything above a certain elevation (maybe 1300m or so). It has a much stronger association with geography and ecology than in Europe, where the association is cultural more than anything. So I think in Europe, "alpine hut" means "a hut managed in the Alpine style" (just like "Alpine style mountaineering"). Whereas in Australia, "alpine hut" means "a hut found in the elevated Alpine region". You might be amused to know that in Victoria (the southeastern state I live in), we also have "Pyrenees", but we don't use this term as much. > I would rather name it neutral, fi (mountain) hut, cabin or lodge. Despite > of the former use, for cattle, hunting or just for emergency like Alpine > shelters in remote areas. In general I don't have a problem with using existing tags, even if the semantics in different regions vary. > If it’s not maintained I would use abandoned instead of ruins. And yes > without maintenance it would graduatedly become a ruin but that’s mainly the > climate. Depends what you mean by "maintained". I think they're generally "maintained" to their current, basic standard - if a wall fell down it would probably be put back up (but I don't know by whom). When huts burn down, they're even sometimes re-built. I should mention for completeness that we do also have genuine, modern huts that are intended for sleeping and eating in, which are weatherproof and have fireplaces, both in the Alpine region and in Tasmania. I'm not talking about those here, though. But I guess tagging the historic ones as amenity=shelter and the modern ones as amenity=wilderness_hut, shelter_type=basic_hut would cover the distinction. (We don't, afaik, have any staffed huts that provide hot meals - our hiking culture is about self-reliance etc.) Steve _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
