non-physical vs physical tags

[marinakukso]

on the wiki page for the sport tag (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:sport#Associated_tags), i see the following:

“Since this is a non-physical tag it should be combined with one of these (physical) tags:”

i tried to find more info about what a non-physical tag is, but had no luck. any clarification on this would be appreciated. thank you.

[alesarrett]

I think that if you focus on the list of tags just below the sentence you reported, you should better understand the meaning.

Primary sports facilities

leisure=sports_centre - several sports on a terrain or under one roof
leisure=stadium - a stadium
leisure=track - race track (athletics, cycling, horse_racing, ...)
leisure=pitch - playing field, can also be in a building
leisure=horse_riding - equestrian facility, riding centre
leisure=swimming_pool (swimming, scuba diving, gymnastics, ...)
landuse=recreation_ground
landuse=winter_sports - an area for winter sports

Specific sports facilities

In these facilities the sport=* should not be used, since it is already stated what kind of sport.

leisure=golf_course
leisure=fitness_centre
leisure=fitness_station

Club

club=sport Sports club

Amenities

Some amenities may have facilities for a sport e.g. an amenity=pub may have sport=billiards and/or sport=darts facilities.
Equipment

Use tags like:

sport:clothes=yes for shop=sports, or
clothes:rental=sport for shop=rental

Example:

climbing:shoes=*

You shall use one of these physical tags to be able to add then a sport=* tag.
A sport is played somewhere (in a stadium, sport centre, pitch, …)…
HTH

Ale

[marinakukso]

thank you ale. i guess i was specifically wondering whether the physical/non-physical tag difference matters for rendering in osm carto. in other words, do non-physical tagged items get rendered by osm carto? thank you.

[SomeoneElse (Andy Townsend)]

To add to what alesarrett said, the “Since this is a non-physical tag” text has been in that page since 2008. My guess is that it’s a translation from German and the sense of the original hasn’t quite got carried over. In English the terms “top-level tag” or “primary tag” are probably more used.

In order to see what the OSM Carto map style currently shows, you can try searching the github source for it. For the tag “sport”, for example: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/search?q=sport.

You can also search for a combination of tags using overpass: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/14NR. That’s looking for the key “sport” without one of the common-top-level tags. For example, https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/6867616648#map=19/41.90836/12.46083 is only shown on OSM Carto as a housenumber, not as anything to do with sport.

[turepalsson (Ture Pålsson)]

I don’t think “physical tag” is a well-defined concept. However, you can loosely group OSM tag in two groups: those that indicate what something is, and those that provide additional information. For example,

highway=residential

tells us that there is a road here, but

width=4

just tells us that something is 4 meters wide, but not what it is. It is these two groups that are referred to as “physical” and “non-physical” in the text you linked.

sports=*

is then a non-physical tag, because it tells us that something is used for a particular sport, but not what that something is.

This, almost by definition, means that objects with only non-physical tags are usually not rendered at all, because there is no way of knowing what they are.

“Physical tags” are sometimes also called “top-level tags”. I think I have seen “primary tags” too.

(Is there a list of physical/primary and non-physical/secondary tags? Unfortunately, no. You’ll have to read the documentation of each tag and figure out which group it belongs to.)

[marinakukso]

thank you everyone, this answers my question! very grateful!