On Mon, Jan 30, 2017 at 7:07 PM, OSM Volunteer stevea <stevea...@softworkers.com> wrote: > The boundary=national_park tag has seen much use and abuse over many years. > Perhaps because it renders as green dashes, it was inappropriately used (and > is today?) for state parks and other non-national parks, though in the past > (five years ago?) this was rather widely tolerated. However, now our > boundary=protected_area and protect_class keys are superior, even as > rendering support for them remains under-developed. That's OK: OSM wants > accurate tagging rather than tagging for the renderer. Renderers can, do and > will "catch up." Not in the case of every tag to be sure, but our > consensus, being of utmost importance, deserves the waits involved, tedious > as this process can be.
The use of UK English as the OSM standard gets in the way here, since the UK has nothing that's a direct parallel to a state park. States of the US at least hypothetically share sovereignty with the Federal government; state parks are the creation of a sovereign entity. In fact, the Adirondack and Catskill Parks in New York State (which, incidentally are not State Parks, but rather constitute the State Forest Preserve) enjoy stronger legal protection than any of our National Parks. The former are enshrined in the state constitution, and it would take a constitutional amendment (a lengthy and complicated legal process, requiring a supermajority in two sessions of the state legislature, plus a popular referendum) to disband or alter them. The latter are the creation of acts of Congress, and what one Congress created another can destroy. I was quite comfortable with boundary=national_park for those entities. (Within them are a large number of boundary=protected area with different protect_classes.) I know that when I worked on retagging the units of the Forest Preserve, I also wound up having some conversations about protect_class. Some people here were reluctant to assign protect_class=1b to the Wilderness, Wlld Forest, Canoe and Primitive areas of these facilities, because they are not Federally designated wilderness. My understanding is that IUCN does not distinguish protected areas based on what government extended the protection. These are all administered as wilderness (in various degrees), and 1b is a better fit than any other designation. The legal designation of these lands is complex, and doesn't really fit any other system. I made some arbitrary decisions with assigning IUCN classes - and then left NYSDEC:category and NYSDEC:class fields in place that carry in words the legal designations in case they should be of interest in the future. Most importantly, in my opinion, I documented all the decisions at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NYS_DEC_Lands and http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import:_NYCDEP_Watershed_Recreation_Areas I'm really fine with less-precise tagging for rendering: few renderers will care about the subtle legal difference between a Wild Forest and a Forest Preserve Detached Parcel, or a Shoreline Protection Area and a Tidal Wetland. The detailed legalities are there in the tagging for those that do care, and the tag values are documented. The protect_class really should pair with a protection_object, and choosing the protection_object generally winds up informing the choice of protect_class. For instance, the New York City-owned recreation areas in the Catskills, while they are popular recreational destinations for hiking, hunting, fishing, trapping, boating and bird watching, all have as their principal objective the protection of the area from development to assure water quality in New York's reservoirs. That fact informed 'protection_object=water', which in turn guided the somewhat unusual choice of 'protect_class=12'. State Historic Sites got 'protection_object=heritage' (and a stack of heritage=* tagging), which in turn informed 'protect_class=22'. The National Park Service-owned corridor of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail got protect_object=recreation, which implied protect_class=21. And so on, and on, and on, through dozens of different special cases. I used leisure=nature_reserve for a great many of these areas. (Nature reserves encompass a wide variety of things.) At such time as protected_area is better supported, the protect_class will give better information, but in the meantime, it gives us something to render. That is important. People relate to parks, and expect to see them on maps. The fact that the rendering has not caught up with the precision of the data model is no excuse to make them disappear from the maps. In short, I tag (in a very limited and specific way) for the renderer today AND for the data model tomorrow. I need both the detailed information of how the land is administered and to have the parks show up on today's maps. I'll be happy to remove inappropriate national_park and nature_reserve once the renderers offer me something better to call the things. As an exception, I'd actually retain the national_park designation for the Adirondack and Catskill parks. These entities are massive: the Adirondack Park is larger than Slovenia. These entities also are administered as complex public-private partnerships with a great many different classes of protection within them. They are not monolithic protected_areas. They also are highly visible to the public, with large signs wherever a highway enters and leaves them. And they are, in effect, the local government for tens of thousands of people who live on inholdings within the parks - surely more visible to the locals than their county governments or the hypothetical governments of their unincorporated townships. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
