On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 6:37 AM Andrew Davidson <thesw...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 6/4/20 9:23 am, Joseph Eisenberg wrote: > > The only thing that the proposal page still needs is a couple more > > detailed definitions for some of the tags. > > Maybe not. A quick read finds this statement: > > protect_class=2 will be tagged as boundary=national_park (de facto) > > This is a problem because boundary=national_park already exists as a > generic tag for a conservation area. A quick survey of all of the > existing boundary=national_park with a wikidata link finds the following > range of IUCN Protected Area Categories: > > Class Count > IA 95 > IB 70 > II 848 > III 74 > IV 277 > V 234 > VI 159 > Total 1757 > > So less than 50% of "National Parks" are Cat II. > > I would suggest adding protection_class=national_park and dropping the > suggestion of using boundary=national_park.
[A side point:] While I regard IUCN as a fine authority for the definition of the protection categories, I have found it to be considerably less useful for the application of the definition. For instance, in my home state of New York, all Wilderness Areas are tagged as category VI on IUCN's site. This is surely incorrect; the language that establishes them is nearly identical to the parallel language in the (US Federal) Wilderness Act. Motorized travel, harvesting of trees, bicycles, the erection of permanent structures (there is an exemption for certain improvements to trails and campsites to protect the rest of the area from hikers), all are strictly forbidden. Areas protected by NGO's (e.g., Nature Conservancy, Open Space Institute, Ducks Unlimited) and land trusts are not listed at all. [A stronger point:] I agree with you that boundary=national_park presents us with an awkward problem: what does it mean? It's a tag that's been around for a long time, and there are over a thousand objects that bear it. If it simply means that an area has the phrase, "National Park" (in the local language) somewhere in its name, it's pretty redundant, and fails to cover features that are national parks in structure and function but named differently. If it simply means 'category II protected area,' then it's surely redundant, but furthermore, half of the ones we have are mistagged. Perhaps most awkwardly, once we've chosen to use the tag, 'boundary=national_park', then 'boundary=protected_area' is no longer available to us. Can we work around the problem simply by allowing 'protection_class' to apply to 'boundary=national_park' as well as 'boundary=protected_area' and asserting that the default value of 'protection_class' for 'national_park' shall be assumed to be 2 (surely the plurality, if not the majority, of the areas listed above)? That could also allow us to choose, for example, 1b for a national park that is all wilderness, or 6 for one of the porous national parks in the UK, where most of the land is in private hands and people continue to live and work inside a park's borders (albeit under severe constraints as to the uses to which the land may be put). We could also then state that 'boundary=national_park' should be used in preference to 'boundary=protected_area' where it applies. That would also allow us to address Joseph Eisenberg's objection (in the talk page on the WIki) that the proposal violates the 'one object, one tag' principle. We could retain established tagging for such things as 'leisure=nature_reserve' or 'landuse=recreation_ground' while still indicating that the features enjoy a particular legal protection, by augmenting the tagging with a 'protection_class'. 'Boundary=protected_area' could then be reserved for the features for which no existing tagging applies. The inapplicability can come about for numerous reasons. For instance, 'protected_area' may become the unifying tag because the protection status is the only salient feature, or because there is no existing tagging that applies well, or because the area admits of mixed land uses that share a common boundary and name. -- 73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging