Hello everyone,
I recently documented the livestock=* key on the OSM Wiki and would like to discuss a broader use of this tag.
My goal is to use livestock=* consistently to describe which animals are present , while using other tags to describe the products , or activity associated with those animals.
Current situation
In some cases, animal species and purpose are combined into a single value. For example:
livestock=broilerslivestock=laying_hens
Similarly, there are tags such as:
industrial=poultry_processing
These tags mix information about the animal with information about how they are used.
Proposal
Use livestock=* only to describe the animal species.
Examples:
livestock=chickenlivestock=cattlelivestock=piglivestock=sheep
Additional tags can then describe the purpose or products.
For example:
Current:
livestock=broilers
Proposed:
livestock=chickenproduct=meat
Current:
livestock=laying_hens
Proposed:
livestock=chickenproduct=egg
This separates the animal from the animal products they are used for and avoids creating many species-animal product combinations.
Slaughterhouses and processing facilities
The same principle could be applied to industrial facilities.
Instead of:
industrial=poultry_processing
we could use:
industrial=slaughterhouselivestock=chicken
or more generally:
industrial=slaughterhouselivestock=*
This allows a single tagging scheme to be used for poultry, cattle, pigs, sheep, and other livestock.
Livestock buildings
The key could also be used with building=livestock to indicate which animals are housed in the building.
Examples:
building=livestock+livestock=chickenbuilding=livestock+livestock=pigbuilding=livestock+livestock=cattle
Benefits
- Separates animal species from products and activities.
- Reduces the need for many specialized values.
- Creates a consistent tagging approach for farms, livestock buildings, slaughterhouses, and processing facilities.
- Makes data easier to query and analyse.
I would be interested in hearing whether others think this direction makes sense, and whether existing livestock-related values should be migrated toward a species-based approach. For transparency I made a few changesets already with the tag review_requested=yes and then someone pointed out that changes of this size should be proposed in the forum first.
