Discussion of the zoo tag

General talk Tagging general discussion
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Hi all,

Coming from a discussion around aviary tagging, I’m bringing up a slightly larger discussion of the zoo=* tag.

Current tagging:

We have tourism=zoo as the top-level tag. In line with other sub-tagging in OSM, zoo=* is then defined as being used to specify the type of zoo.

Some values which seem sensible are:

as these are all types of zoo.

However, there are a few more problematic values:

  • zoo=enclosure - not a type of zoo but rather a feature inside a zoo.
  • zoo=aviary - not a type of zoo but rather a place to keep one (or more) birds (basically a more specific name for a bird enclosure).

there are then some values which attempt to specify the animal being kept in the zoo:

however, these are ambiguous. They can be used both to say the zoo only has those animals or they can be used to say that a specific part of a zoo only has those animals.

Question: does it make sense to keep the zoo tag as is, with a mix of different meanings? Or should we try and come up with a better scheme to zoo tagging?

A similar recent discussion was around tagging of aquariums.

Possible suggestion:

One option might be to use the man_made key, e.g., man_made=enclosure, man_made=aviary, man_made=aquarium alongside the animal key (or species etc) to identify the type of animal(s) being kept in those enclosures/aviaries etc. These could then be used independently of zoo=* which we would reserve to only using as the type of zoo tagging.

Butterfly example:
Butterfly zoo (where butterflies are the only/main attraction):

  • tourism=zoo + zoo=butterfly.

Butterfly house inside a larger zoo

  • tourism=zoo reserved for the larger zoo campus
  • man_made=enclosure + animal=butterfly
  • perhaps building=butterfly_house (or something like that if it was inside a specific building).

Edit: there is also the well established attraction=animal tag though that doesn’t necessarily describe the building/enclosure itself.

Interested to hear your thoughts!

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It seems like the ambiguity isn’t really a problem because the subtag meaning (e.g. zoo=wildlife_park) only applies when combined with tourism=zoo, while the other meanings apply as toplevel tags. That seems like a clear enough distinction, but maybe I’m missing something?

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My post here may be relevant.

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Interested to hear your thoughts!

thank you for dealing with this, I agree with your findings (although I noticed that zoo=enclosure is documented to potentially mean a kind of zoo with traditional enclosures), and with the proposed solutions to add individual zoo features as man_made=* rather than as “zoo”

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True, though I would say:

  • It is (presumably) best practice for a key to only mean one thing, rather than requiring a data consumer to inspect other tags to understand the context of the key.
  • I think we usually have sub-tags to mean a type of the main tag, rather than to mean some related feature (though I’m sure there are examples of the latter of course!).
  • Not all of the feature values are exclusively for features of zoos, so more generic tagging could be useful (e.g., a generic tag for aviaries could be used both in zoos and not in zoos).
  • Relying on contextual tagging does seem to make tagging less resilient to mistakes. In this case, a missed tag (tourism=zoo) changes the meaning of the item but it also makes it difficult for QA/data validators to identify it as a tagging mistake. Whereas for other tags, e.g., service=driveway without highway=service, a data validator can see the missed tag as a tagging mistake but still understand what the user was likely trying to tag.

A bit of searching on OT suggests there are a dozens of zoo=petting_zoo\wildlife_park\sarfari_park without the tourism=zoo tag for example. Though it is worth noting that most of those examples are for petting zoos and perhaps a petting zoo can be located inside a larger feature that isn’t a zoo (such as a farm) so that’s less clear (even if not the documented way of tagging petting zoos).

Thanks, I must admit I missed that. But that sort of usage does seem a bit odd to me. All zoos, by their nature, include animals in some form of enclosure, surely?

OT stats:
tourism=zoo + zoo=enclosure: 506
tourism!=* + zoo=enclosure: 921

Also, worth noting that the majority of instances of this tagging is in just one country (Germany with 59% of instances).

Thanks, yes I’m sure butterfly house is probably very UK specific so something more generic would be useful instead!

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I honestly prefer the tag landuse=animal_enclosure instead of man_made because enclosures are often more a use of land instead of an object.
It’s also already bering used
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/landuse=animal_enclosure#overview

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I’m pleased about your initiative and think it’s a good solution. I’ve always been bothered by the ambiguity without wanting to change anything.

I also support this

Althogh landuse is more and more used for detailed mapping, I think it shouldn’t be done this way. ‘landuse’ is meant for a broad area and should not be used for a single object like an enclosure.

2 Likes
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Thanks for the suggestion, it’s not a tag I’d seen before. However, I agree with Robert, I don’t particularly like the landuse tag for these but understand why you might.

It is but it seems like around half of all uses are in a very clustered area of Oman, originate from one single changeset, and have a different meaning to what we’re talking about (more like a farming animal pen and certainly not related to zoos).

Edit: of course, that doesn’t mean we couldn’t use it. It would just be quite general when we may wish to be more specific for zoos vs farms.

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Thanks for the comments so far. I’m thinking of putting together two proposals:

  1. Define zoo=* as a descriptive key for the type of zoo (only). Include petting_zoo, wildlife_park, and safari_park as example values (any others?). Discourage use for tagging features inside a zoo.

  2. Introduce tagging for some zoo-related features, specifically thinking man_made=enclosure (maybe animal_enclosure would be better?), man_made=aviary, man_made=fish_tank (any others?). This is to provide approved replacements for some of the features currently mapped using the (hopefully soon to be) discouraged tagging above. Although, to be clear, this would not be approval to mass edit tags.

My thinking is separating these out means objections to one proposal won’t affect the other (or should I combined into one larger proposal, thoughts?).

As always, happy for input!

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I would prefer to have man_made=animal_enclosure for open spaces and building=livestock for roofed spaces, and then specify the animals with animal=* (animal=birds means aviary, animal=fish means fish tank/aquarium, animal=elephant means elephant house, animal=pig means pig sty, etc.). This scheme can then also be used for farm buildings and enclosures without the need for non-native speakers of English to know all the specific words English has for housing of specific animals. Enclosures and buildings that have several kinds of animals in them can then be described by naming all the animals separated by a semicolon (the great cats building is then building=livestock + animal=lion;leopard;tiger;jaguar;cheetah)

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I certainly understand the rationale but I don’t think livestock is the right value. My understanding of “livestock” is that it typically refers to domesticated farm animals (cattle, chickens, pigs). I certainly can’t imagine a giraffe being classed as livestock!

I did think about using animal_enclosure but I think that could be confusing to have it as a value for man_made (outdoors) and building (indoors).

So open to the idea but I think we need a better value tag for buildings.

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It’s the rationale I care about, native Eglish speakers can choose the value they’re most comfortable with. For me it’s just a string of letters. What’s in a name…

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From some searching it appears “indoor enclosure” or “animal house” are common British English terms. But I think these imply larger scale buildings, so we may still need a way to tag individual enclosures.

Some examples:

An outdoor enclosure only (e.g., deer)

  • man_made=animal_enclosure
  • tourism=attraction
  • attraction=animal
  • animal=*

An outdoor enclosure with an indoor enclosure (e.g. for night/cold/rain)
for the (presumably larger) outdoor enclosure area:

  • man_made=animal_enclosure
  • tourism=attraction
  • attraction=animal
  • animal=*

for the building (usually inside the outdoor area):

  • building=indoor_enclosure

An indoor enclosure only (e.g., a reptile house)

  • building=indoor_enclosure
  • tourism=attraction
  • attraction=animal
  • animal=*

For micro-mapping purposes, I think also being able to tag individual tanks inside an animal enclosure could be useful (e.g., individual tanks in an arachnid exhibit) . For example:

  • man_made=fish_tank
  • man_made=bird_cage

or, more generally,

  • man_made=animal_cage
  • man_made=animal_tank (a terrarium but I think that may be too technical for general tagging)