Hi,
i am tagging manholes for some time now whenever i go through areas again. As i live in an area in Germany where we have access to the cadastre, and we have legal obligations for property owners to have Manholes on their private property (Revisionschächte) one can easily distinguish between manholes for sewer/rainwater on public ground, and private property manholes.
I now stumpled upon the Josm manhole preset which lists “operator” as a possible tag so i was thinking about using that to distinguish between public utility manholes, and manholes on private property.
Now “operator” is defined as
The operator tag is used to name a company, corporation, person or any other entity who is directly in charge of the current operation of a map object.
Which does not really fit - i dont want to list individual persons who own/operate that property - so i was thinking of something like “operator=private” or something.
taginfo lists operator=private on page 4 with 0.09%
ownership=* and operator:type=* seem to have the same meaning.
operator:type has much higher usage.
operator=* is ‘approved’, but operator:type is de facto.
Are these manholes actually owned and/or operated by the house-owner? I have quite some weird objects and access points that I must allow on my property, probably also some that I don’t even know of until they break and cause havoc, but I don’t own them and I am not even allowed to operate them.
In most cases manholes on private properties are for the inspection of the private ground pipes connecting to the public sewage network. There are 3 types: rainwater, sewage water or combined and these manholes are the property of the landlord (to avoid saying "the property of the property owner). It depends on the municipality if you as a property owner are obliged to have one on your property or if it is your choice - but in any case you are the owner and these manholes are exclusively used to service your own groundpipes.
operator:type=private would serve fine for those manholes, but
this tag is used to give more information about the type of operator=* for a feature.
so what to tag as operator=* is still the question.
Possibly in some cases there may be manholes on private proberties operated by public enterprises, covered by some special rights (similar to a public right of way on a private property) but I have no idea how to distuinguish these from the private ones.
I’m fine with any method, however (warning: drifting away from the subject) I don’t think operator=* is a main key/* and I do think operator:type=* can be used without the operator key, especially with values like public and private!
Side-topic:
/* main keys define the object category, I think, such as landuse for land use objects, natural for objects that grow or flow by nature, man_made for objects that are - well, objects that do not fall under any other category, amenity for amenity objects, highway for highway-related objects, etcetera. operator=* does not define such a main object category.
The object is a manhole, which is - what, man_made I think? So man_made is the main key, man_made=manhole is the main tag, with manhole=* as a logical secondary defining key. The rest of the tags are attributes.
That is how I understand the logic of OSM tagging.
Maybe you are right, but logically an operator:type does not make much sense to me if there is no operator. The description of the key in the wiki says accordingly:
This tag is used to give more information about the type of operator=* for a feature.
But I would not want to argue about that. I think ownership=private suits the private manhole covers better, but if someone prefers operator:type=private without operator it is fine with me.