When tagging a surveillance camera as camera:type=panning, what value should I use for camera:direction if I want to indicate that it can pan a full 360 degrees? Or does panning already indicate that?
Note that this is for a camera whose lens points in a specific direction, but then moves (automatically or manually-controlled) around a full circle.
Key📷direction - OpenStreetMap Wiki doesn’t really address this, and https://sunders.uber.space/ doesn’t show any field-of-view for these cameras (I was kind of expecting a full circle to be displayed). I know the latter is a third-party app so this likely isn’t the place to discuss its functionality, but I think it partly relevent as it’s the best (only?) place to see this data visualised…
I was having the same question today as my city is changing some of the dome cameras for panning ones. I am a (compulsive) mapper of cameras for technopolice.fr, a campaign in France that analyses surveillance systems.
But attention, the tag camera:direction does not indicate the field of view, it does only indicate the direction to which the camera points. A dome camera does not have a direction of 360 degrees, but a field of view of 360 in sunders.uber.space. I am saying this juste in case there is a mis-understanding between direction and field of view.
Now as for panning, I think that putting a direction to panning cameras is not appropriate. In my city (Marseille, France) and more generally in France, we know that at the public urban supervision center (that’s how they call here the special police station where camera images are being sent and visualised on these walls fullof screens of camera images ) employees (police forces) can manually take control of a panning camera and direct it as needed with a mouse and keyboard. This information comes directly from police forces working at the center, that we met during an police open-doors event This is also something that the OSM wiki indicates for panning type : Key📷type - OpenStreetMap Wiki
A camera capable of rotating, either along a set path or through the remote use of a joystick or something along those lines
So panning should be treated as domes, no direction in OSM , field of view 360 degrees in Sunders. What sunders.uber.space does is that is gives panning a different icon (a camera icon with an arrow indicating that it moves, but no field of view as in this example :
We maybe should ask sunders to add a field of view of 360 degrees for panning as for domes. I will send an email.
And maybe in OSM there should be a camera:field-of-view tag. Using camera:direction with a range is currently not allowed by the description tag :
The value must be either a cardinal direction, (N, S, E, W) or an angle in degrees clockwise.
This is also something that the OSM wiki indicates for panning type : 