I believe that if one is tagging an area to imply that there is contamination, one should cite an authoritative source. Having your property tagged as potentially contaminated could lead to difficulties in selling or refinancing the property. Even if a property was contaminated, it could be remediated to the point where no contamination exists on the site anymore. If the tags are not maintained, they will likely be inaccurate.
In the US, when a person/corporation has a major financial or ownership transaction related to a property, there is often a review of the current and historical activities that have taken place on and in the vicinity of the property. (A Phase I Environmental Assessment). The result of this is a list of potential environmental risks or hazards. I would suggest keeping information about contamination out of OSM and leave it up to the end user to mash OSM data with up-to-date data from the local environmental authority. If one has knowledge about current (and maybe past) land use activities, they could tag that. This in turn could be a good source for people who are doing environmental assessments. Think about the weight of tagging a property as contaminated. Incorrectly tag a property as a pub and you might get some frustrated people parked in front of the house on a Saturday night. Incorrectly tag a property as contaminated and you may delay an important transaction or force a person to spend money to prove that their property isn't contaminated. David. On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 4:58 AM, Steve Bennett <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 9:36 PM, Frederik Ramm <[email protected]> wrote: >> These things need not be, and have never been, global in OSM. If one local >> community happens to have the manpower locally then it's great if they >> manage to record all that detail, and we should be very careful not to make >> decisions that keep them from doing so because we figured that we'd never be >> able to collect that data for the whole country or the whole world. > > That is true - good point. I guess issues arise when we have to choose > between a tagging scheme that allows maximum power (although that > power will rarely be realised) and one that is most useful to most > people. > > Steve > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk > _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
