I’d like to seek opinions about defining a specific tag for the playing area of leisure=miniature_golf courses. The rationale is simple: The de-facto tag in use is golf=green, which is used for the putting green on golf courses. This means it’s not possible to differentiate between real golf greens and minigolf greens (without writing a recursive overpass query to identify greens within miniature golf areas). In my opinion, it really doesn’t feel appropriate to use the same golf=green tag on a crazy golf course; according to https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:sport%3Dgolf , sport=golf is implied for golf=green. It also advises not to tag sport=golf on (real) golf greens, so it’s hard to justify using sport=miniature_golf on golf=green, in my opinion. For this reason, I’d advocate for using leisure=pitch + sport=miniature_golf going forwards or coming up with a new tag entirely to represent these playing areas.
Example minigolf playing areas: (some will have ramps, bridges and water features)
Please share any other examples of micromapped minigolf courses, it would be useful to see what other tags have been used in mapping them. There still remains the question of how to tag the individual pins (holes), obstacles, surfaces and water hazards (if anyone’s bothered with that yet ).
Attached below: A little poll to see what solution(s) should be considered further. For clarity, ‘miniature golf playing areas’ refers to the playing area of an individual hole of miniature golf, including obstacles. Please vote for ‘a new tag’ if you don’t like any of the above options, miniature_golf=green is just an example of what might be appropriate. It’s set as ranked choice voting, because why not.
I find golf=green as Mistagging for the renderer, it is supposed to be “The area of short grass on smooth ground surrounding a hole” and that minigolf course picture (and all the minigolf courses I’ve seen) are not any “areas of short grass”
Thus I’d avoid anything with “green” in name, as it would be misleading (even if I voted for miniature_golf=green option)
Ummm, we already have leisure=miniature_golf, but it is used for tagging whole playing area (i.e. all the courses), and I think this question is how to tag individual course inside such larger playing area.
If we are going to pretend that “woven pieces of plastic painted in green” are “grass”, we might as well declare that there are already a new competing intelligent species on Earth, which we call AI.
But I still wouldn’t tag those areas as golf=green, even if they were somehow (shudder) found on a “real” golf course.
Thanks for sharing this very detailed miniature golf course, it’s good to see that micromapping is possible and has been done before. I think it’s quite clear from the initial voting that we should move away from using golf=green to map the individual playing areas of each hole. Despite higher support for leisure=pitch + sport=miniature_golf, I’m not proposing a mechanical edit just yet. In the meantime, I was considering adding a temporary tag ‘note:retag=miniature_golf’ (or similar) to at least mark the ways that need retagging in the future.
Secondly, as we can see in this micromapped minigolf course, other golf features such as golf=tee, golf=hole, golf=pin etc. are being used to map minigolf course features. Based on the previous discussion and vote, I’d assume we’d want to move away from using any and all golf tags within miniature golf courses, in favour of new dedicated tags (for example, miniature_golf=pin, as suggested by @watmildon ). I’ll put another indicative vote below, feel free to share opinions on this too.
Replace all golf= tags within leisure=miniature_golf? (e.g. golf=tee, golf=hole, golf=pin)
Yes
No
0voters
Mammi71
(One feature, Six mappers and still More ways to map it)
9
I don’t see any need for that. Miniature golf was borrowed from golf and uses largely the same terminology.
I can understand that people don’t want to use terms like golf=green for boring miniature golf courses that consist of prefabricated elements that are simply set up. I also support this request.
However, modern and attractive mini golf courses today are much closer to their larger counterparts. They have been elaborately designed and shaped individually, with tees, bunkers, rough, pin flag and holes just like the big ones. It should remain permissible to use the same terms for the same things that are actually present on site.
The fact that it is mini golf is already clear from the tagging of the surrounding area with leisure=miniature_golf.
For this purpose, we have established tags in OSM such as surface=artificial_turf vs. surface=grass, just as one can also distinguish between soccer pitches.
Agree. Creating and maintaining almost a perfect duplicate of tags and documentation seems wrong and wasteful. (e.g. just like we don’t use separate footway_surface=* to differentiate it from road surface=* because it might have a separate value or two that are unlikely on roads)
Agreed. Although, my problem is not that it is “boring” but that is symbolizes something quite different then what tag golf=green has been designed to mean (so abusing that tag to mean something else too would needlessly skunk it)
I also agree. So, we can invent a new tag e.g. golf=minigolf_pitch and people can then add extra surface=* tag to it. In (extremely rare?) cases when it happens to be real grass, one could also alternatively use golf=green instead of golf=minigolf_pitch + golf=green (it would not be wrong in that case, just little less descriptive).
Note: that only describes the general idea, I’m somewhat unhappy with golf=minigolf_pitch being exact tag name – OTOH, it would make sense to be in golf=* namespace (as all other tags that could be used for micromapping golf / minigolf courses would be, as noted in top paragraph), but on the other hand, it seems somewhat confusing and overspecific. Better ideas are welcome.
Yes, this is my exact point, it’s not possible to differentiate a ‘real’ golf hole from a miniature golf hole under current tagging (determining if it’s inside a golf course or miniature golf course with an expensive overpass query doesn’t really count). I couldn’t estimate the number of golf=green within leisure=miniature_golf worldwide for this reason, the query took too long for overpass to handle. My suggestion to replace golf= tags on minigolf courses is because the only other alternative (that I can think of) is adding sport=miniature_golf to each of the golf features mapped. I don’t like this solution however, golf=hole + sport=miniature_golf feels a bit trolltaggy to me. Nevertheless, I used the recursive overpass query from my original post to identify all golf= tags within leisure=miniature_golf and add sport=miniature_golf to them (as a temporary measure to differentiate these features). Most were golf=green which we’ve tentatively agreed to replace, but there were lots of golf=pin, golf=hole, even golf=fairway. If you’d like to see what’s been tagged, use this query. highway=footway + golf=path + sport=miniature_golf doesn’t seem like a particularly elegant solution for tagging a path that is miles away from the actual nearest golf course, but that’s the only way I can see to differentiate for now.
Quite frankly, I don’t understand the opposition to creating a new set of keys to tag these features. Golf is quite different from crazy golf and while there may be physical similarities between the components of the courses, they are by definition not ‘golf’ features. Describing the potential creation of new tags as ‘wrong and wasteful’ is not something I expected to read on the OSM forums today and is in my opinion a pretty poor argument to raise at such an early stage of a tagging discussion. I’d love to hear constructive criticism of ways we could solve this tagging ambiguity that I believe exists, rather than outright rejecting such an idea before a proposal has even been written.
Mammi71
(One feature, Six mappers and still More ways to map it)
14
To be honest, I don’t understand the problem. That’s exactly what a spatial database query should be able to do.
Wanting to replace all golf=* sounds a bit like tagging for the query.
golf=* elements in golf_course:
golf=* elements in miniature_golf
I limited myself to Wales because overpass turbo is often too busy at the moment.
I don’t think golf and miniature golf are related, using the golf key does not make sense. The featureset of golf and miniature golf is completely different
3 Likes
Mammi71
(One feature, Six mappers and still More ways to map it)
16
Then show me the differences and I will probably have to reply that we are talking about completely different mini golf courses.
Mammi71
(One feature, Six mappers and still More ways to map it)
17
What is correct (after looking at a few mini golf courses with my overpass query): on many mini golf courses, the entire playing field is marked as golf=green. This is, of course, incorrect. If anything, it should be marked as golf=fairway. However, for the simpler mini golf courses (those that are not modelled so closely on real golf courses), I would also simply mark this as leisure=pitch and not fairway.
This does not automatically make tee, hole and pin incorrect, if present.
An outsider’s suggestion: how about introducing golf=pitch or something similar (minigolf_pitch?)? On one hand, this would differentiate them from nebulous leisure=pitch and unambigously place them as a part of the golf “namespace” (cf. playground) ; on the other, this would separate them from proper golf=green or fairway values.
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