I’d like to clarify the intended use of the sport=skiing tag in the wiki. It’s unclear whether this tag should be used for any type of skiing or only downhill skiing. Given most skiers specialize in one discipline, and most ski areas only offer a single kind of skiing, this ambiguity reduces the tag’s usefulness.
Status quo
Determining the disciplines of a ski area is unnecessarily complicated and error prone at the moment. For a landuse=winter_sports ski area, you’d need to query the pistes inside that area and inspect their tags. For site=piste relations, the member pistes need to be inspected. This can break subtly when neighboring ski areas with different disciplines intersect.
It should be easy to query like finding other points of interests in OpenStreetMap is.
Possible solutions
1. Introduce more specific sport tags
Deprecate sport=skiing and encourage use of:
sport=downhill_skiing
sport=cross_country_skiing (already in use)
sport=ski_touring
Pros
simplest tagging scheme
scales well to related disciplines like snowboarding
extends the pattern established by sport=cross_country_skiing
Cons
might negatively affect maps/software that relies on sport=skiing
hard to reach consensus on a deprecation
1b. Introduce more specific sport tags (without deprecation)
Another option could be to encourage adding both the generic skiing and discipline specific sport.
Given the sport=skiing tag has only 5801 uses and adoption was flat for the last 10 years, the impact of deprecation seems rather low. Given that, I’m in favor of option 1 given I find it the most intuitive and scalable.
I like the idea of subtags of skiing=. I think deprecating sport=skiing would be a lot more work and probably result in data consumers having to support both for the foreseeable future. The subtag would mean that any skiing tagged with skiing=* could be supported with more detail, and un-subtagged features would be left as a generic.
Also, I’m not sure that everyone mapping skiing features would be able to tell what type they would be, so leaving it generic at least adds it to the map, and the subtag could be added later.
I propose the nr. 3 because i map a lot of climbing areas and the idea is to be similar to climbing styles tag ( Climbing - OpenStreetMap Wiki ), I think it will be easy for the outdoor people like me to map different sport with the same mindset. I wasn’t aware about the access restriction tag, but I don’t think it’s a big problem, personally i see a good tag tagging a piste using
skiing:downhill=yes
skiing:touring=no
Basically you can tag the sport admitted and prohibited with the same tag style, I think it’s not a cons. And personally I don’t like the idea of deprecate sport=skiing.
After giving it a bit of thought. As much as in general I dislike the concept of breaking backward compatibility, I believe splitting off sport=cross_country_skiing and sport=ski_touring, while leaving sport=skiing for Alpine (& Freestyle), should be the easiest way forward here.
If sport=skiing is to be defined as all types of skiing, then it is bound to be as useful, as using sport=ball for both handball, volleyball and baseball would be (not very useful). Heck, even using sport=football for both soccer and rugby would make more sense than using sport=skiing for both alpine and nordic skiing, yet we don’t do sport=football + football=gaelic tagging. Having all skiing-related activities under a sport=skiing tag makes the tag too vague to be useful IMO.
Why do I propose the tagging scheme to be as laid out in the first paragraph:
sport=cross_country_skiing is already relatively popular
sport=ski_jumping is already even more popular (despite technically being skiing too)
sport=skiing without CC & Touring would be a nice counterpart to the sport=snowboard, as both tags would then encompass roughly the same types of activities
Unless one is from the Scandinavia, in 99% of cases [citation needed] “skiing” is a shorthand for “recreational alpine skiing” (which means that in 99%* of cases the features will be already tagged with the correct sport – hooray)
I didn’t really want to comment on this as it is not going to go anywhere, but just to clear up one misconception: the sport tag is used to identify sport specific infrastructure when applied to areas. There is no infrastructure use difference between modern skis, carving skis, freestyle skis, snowboards, mono skis, telemark skis and any number of variants that I have forgotten about in the last 6 decades and touring skiing doesn’t need any specific infrastructure at all.
Leaves cross country skiing and ski jumping for which you could argue that the required infrastructure is really different, but I haven’t seen any convincing argument why that can’t be covered by subtags up to now.
Don’t change the meaning of a tag once already in use, especially for ski-related features that are touched by a contributor once every few year, you can’t seriously expect any re-mapping.
Leaves cross country skiing and ski jumping for which you could argue that the required infrastructure is really different, but I haven’t seen any convincing argument why that can’t be covered by subtags up to now.
If we were starting from scratch, the ideal scheme for me would be sport=downhill_skiing | cross_country_skiing | ski_jumping. Using subtags feels like a step in the wrong direction, adding a little extra complexity for the sake of backwards compatibility.
Moreover, cross country and ski jumping already have sport tags documented on the wiki, this would be introducing another way of representing them.
In general I would agree, but not necessarily in case of this particular tag
Peak sport=skiingusage was apparently in 2016. The OSM Wiki article at that moment had, apart from the templates, literally zero text content. Plus a prominent message box stating that “it’s usage and definition is unclear”. And not much changed since then.
How can one change the meaning of a tag if the meaning was never really concrete
The currently featured MapRoullete challenge has 11175 tasks, so I guess checking up a dataset half that size could actually be feasible
Recently I’ve been revisiting and clarifying Wiki information on pistes and found the entire tagging scheme relatively consistently defined and used, warts and all. For the start, it clearly separates pistes (i.e. infrastructure) for alpine/downhill, cross-country/nordic and other flavors of skiing, such as ski touring.
It did not occur to me to check the usage and consistency of “sister” tags, such as sport. Most of the map features tagged with above links can be trivially tagged with one or more sport=* sub-tags. What remains would be various club and office=association seats unrelated with physical infrastructure, which would need revisiting.
I agree that sport=skiing is so ambiguous that the best course of action would be to just kill it with fire, save perhaps for FIS headquarters, (which, by the way, do not have any sport tag).
