I searched tags and nothing obvious came up for me. I’m interesting in mapping, classifying and tagging crypto mining facilities. For example Riot has a few large crypto mining facilities. I’m not great with OSM terminology yet (still learning), but I was wondering if there’s an appropriate template to use, required or at least best-practices tags to apply, etc. Thanks!
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Not sure. Closest thing I can find is https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:industrial=data_centre.
waste_of_energy=yes
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Are the locations advertised?
This has verifiability concerns for smaller ones, which may come and go in a short period of time unnoticed. They better have a significant size, is signposted or advertised, and a stable reliable business.
The closest one now is still telecom=data_center Talk:Key:resource - OpenStreetMap Wiki
=data_center should be clarified on whether to be used for facilities which are not mainly for data storage and handling, for the non-technical connotation and expectation. I would discuss supercomputers and computation centers together. The latter may not be all by universities, or for researching. There’s exactly 1 =supercomputer now. telecom= itself is somewhat underdeveloped now, while using it for such features may be awkward for not exactly being communications. man_made=supercomputer | Tags | OpenStreetMap Taginfo
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Riot advertises their sites, I know some others do as well.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=ATYL may be relevant here, maybe some tags need to be invented
if you want to get advise - can you share some photos of facilities from outside?
And for example one shown in https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1507605/000149315224044817/ex99-1.htm is large enough that I would use man_made=works + landuse=industrial + some extra tagging indicating type of facility
product=cryptocurrency ?
there may be taggable smaller objects
You can try looking at location of some known facilities and see how they are tagged. But I expect that many are missing or not tagged consistently.
At least currently, the norm is physical tangible products being manufactured in =works
This size is still possible for other =data_center
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the page you linked about man_made=works says it is for tagging a factory or production plant (is there a difference?) which doesn’t fit for a data center or computing site, does it?
“industrial production plant” seems fitting to me for such facility, but I am not a native speaker
@ZeLonewolf @SomeoneElse - hopefully I can ping you for expertise on that? (feel free to PM me and tell me to stop doing this)
I agree that these should be landuse=industrial telecom=data_center for the site and building=industrial telecom=data_center for the buildings.
Adding product or similar should be in addition to those base tags.
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I wouldn’t overthink it. I’d just go with something like landuse=industrial; industrial=data_centre, perhaps with data_centre=somethingorother. I suspect that there’s nothing special about the buildings themselves beyond (if they are specialist building types, which they may not be) building=data_center (note the misspelling on that tag compared to the other one, but those are the most popular from taginfo).
This wiki page suggests telecom=data_center which to my ears is not a sensible suggestion for most data centres - most are nothing to do with telecoms, and much of what might have been in “telecoms data centres” 20 years ago is now using the same cloud resources as everyone else.
I may be overly cynical, but I suspect that the main reason for this question might have been to link to one particular company from an OSM site for SEO purposes. I removed that link with a mod hat on, but left the question because it still seemed like a sensible question.
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I’d prefer a feature tag for these, along the lines of man_made=works, e.g. man_made=data_centre, and not just a landuse specification
You can add what you like of course, as long as it’s not objectively wrong; but industrial does tend to be used as a feature tag - see e.g. here and here.
I agree that these are essentially data centers.
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I know there’s some movement into this direction, but it is still not very established (grinding_mills aside), there’s more “industry type” tagging in “industrial” so far:
oil (37,7%)
gas (2,4%)
communication (0,9%)
landuse refinement:
wellsite (6,7%)
factory (6,3%)
depot (4,6%)
warehouse (2,7%) (individual warehouses are tagged as building=warehouse)
well_cluster (1,6%)
features:
grinding mill (11,2%) (btw., these are 34,8k there are also 39,1k craft=grinding_mill)
scrap_yard (3,3%)
brickyard (2,2%)
port (1,5%)
mine (1,2%)
sawmill (1,1%)
on a tag that is used 310k times.
I don’t say we could not use any tag we like, also “industrial” as a feature tag, but it is a mixed bag now, while man_made is a long standing tag for industrial facilities in OSM and has many uses, e.g. 298k petroleum_well, 235k works, 90k wastewater_plant, 43k water_works, 33k pumping_station, etc.)
To be fair, =oil and =gas were at least once significantly mass-added before, with the latter already voted to be replaced by utility=gas
I do advocate for eg man_made=works as the PoI feature. The vast majority of industrial= are used on landuse= , not alone. But telecom= is at least less vague for most data, and =data_center is already used there.
At the same time, I did say it’s not the best for a few reasons. In fact, =data_center doesn’t reach 4k, and had a mass addition osm tag history
Another problem telecom= has is the divide with communication= ( communication:*= is from man_made=tower ) , which strangely uses telecom:medium= in reverse. telecom=line has been used against communication=line , again once mass-added.
I agree, I thing building=data_center is much more sensible than telecom=data_center.
At a high level, crypto mining is just a particular subset of data processing. I guess I would prefer building=data_center as well, and I guess I’m asking the community if that’s OK or if I should go another route.
In some places I see individual physical objects getting detailed - power poles and power substations in particular. Would the community respond positively or negatively about marking and tagging visible data center equipment: chillers, cooling towers, generators, transformers, etc?
I like the idea of maybe adding in data_centre=<subcategory> where that’s available, for demographics. I imagine validation may be difficult, however, along with coming up with a sensible set of values. And that might make more sense on a building rather than land, as a large data center property can have multiple buildings with different purposes. I could propose a subcategory list if that were of interest.
Reading through this thread, one thing I’m picking up is that tracing and tagging properties ought to be different from buildings - something I wasn’t especially sensitive to before (I’m new here :D) I’ll pay more attention to that going forward.
I agree, at a high level they’re data processing facilities like other data centers. I think “data center” makes sense as an encompassing category.
However, they are typically built in a way that’s distinguishable from non-crypto data centers. It makes me wonder if the community would find it acceptable to add a bit of metadata to record that.