First of all, a little bit of context:
I went to a sculpture park yesterday which turned out to be a bit of a disappointment because there was little to no documentation on site.
Of course I turned to OSM and yes, the sculptures were there (most of them), but just their positions no artist or any other meaningful data.
So today, I started to add sculpture names, artist names, material, image, start_date, whatever I could gather and created a few change sets. But whilst doing so I realized that most of these sculptures didn’t have a name and with the exception of OSMand, the OSM based apps I tried (OrganicMaps, BikeRooter, Komoot doesn’t show anything) seem to only show the name of the object and none of the additional information. Which means they will show nothing if the name is empty.
This leads me to a few questions:
Is it ok to bend the name field to show artist + name of the sculpture? Like “Uli Gsell - From dawn till dusk”, or “Takera Narita - No name”
Aside from OsmAnd, is anyone aware of an app using OSM data which would work well in the context of someone wanting to explore multiple sculptures in walking/bicycle distance? A routing app like OsmAnd seems to be way too complicated for this task in my opinion.
I plan to add all details to the remaining 20+ sculptures and once done recommend an app to others as the tool to use when people want to explore the park, especially the major of the village which this park is part of.
This isn’t unheard of, but name=* should be for only the sculpture’s name, not any ancillary information, since it’s up to each data consumer to decide how to label a feature. We have a guideline against “tagging for the renderer” because we don’t want to disadvantage data consumers – OsmAnd in this case – that are implementing the tags as intended. A more descriptive name could actually be counterproductive: it could make the sculptures more difficult to search for by name in some geocoders, since “from dawn till dusk” would no longer be an exact match.
There’s an outstanding feature request for Organic Maps to expose more details about a work of art, similar to how OsmAnd does it:
I understand your frustration - I have also added many artworks with artist names and start dates but unfortunately rarely see them rendered in the apps I use.
It is tempting to abuse the name field for this but that would definitely come under Tagging for the renderer and is not allowed.
There is at least an issue open on OrganicMaps about this: https://git.omaps.dev/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/9705 from about 6 months ago, so people could perhaps indicate their support for this feature there. With the current issues at OM I’m not sure how soon that would be addressed though.
Here you see that it displays a lot of information about a work of art, as long as that info is in OSM. It also shows any tagged photos, wikidata entries etc. so maybe it’s worth a try. I’m not sure which languages the web app has been translated into so far, as it’s very work-in-progress just now.
Thanks both for your quick responses.
I wasn’t aware of the “tagging for the renderer” policy but this does make a lot of sense to me.
Should a sculpture with no name then just be empty or would “no name” be correct?
I was actually thinking of opening an issue with OrganicMaps, thanks for pointing out the existing issue.
Also tried cartes.app, doesn’t seem to find any of “my” sculptures though?
Also seems to be hard-coded to french.
In the meantime I also checked out a few more apps and websites but none seem to really hit the sweet spot of being simple to use for non IT people and still show all available details for a POI.
Tried Vom Morgen bis zum Abend · OsmAPP, which shows the only sculpture which was already tagged by someone else. Wrongly as I understand now as both the name of the artist and the name of the sculpture were added to the name tag.
If you change the map layer to OSM Carto, all other sculptures nearby will show, but you can’t get to the details. So also not a winner…
Sounds like there is a need for a POI viewer app? Select the type of POI you are interested in (artwork in my case) and then present a map showing all the details for the POIs matching the selection?
If you are interested in this specific park, rather than a general solution, would it work to create a GPX file with waypoints for the sculptures, and distribute that rather than the map itself? Or a map in umap as someone else suggested, although it may not be so easy to use one a phone.
Trying MapComplete right now, doesn’t seem to load, waiting for the timeout and will try later again.
Yes, refering to Osmapp.org. The issue here is that sculptures with a name show, and all the data I added earlier as well. Like the Uli Gsell one from my link. But the one’s without a title won’t show at all, and according to the conversation higher up I should not add a name if there is none.
The only way to see the nameless sculptures is by changing the layer to OSM Carto, but then you can’t click the POI any longer?
Right now I am only interested in this park, but if it turns out that there is a need for such a POI viewer app I might consider starting one, would make a nice FOSS project I think.
Edit: Second glance
I also added Wikipedia links referncing the artists which unfortunately don’t show
A question for the wider audience, all these sculptures are part of an artist gathering which has got it’s own wikipedia page: Bildhauersymposion Oggelshausen – Wikipedia.
I think it would be useful to somehow link each sculpture to this page. Is there an obvious tag I would use for that or is this too much information to go into OSM?
A wikipedia link should directly refer to the OSM object. If you place a link at one of the artworks, it should be an wikipedia article about the artwork, not the artist. If there is no separate article for the artwork but for the artist only, use artist:wikipedia=* for it, as described in the wiki: Key:wikipedia - OpenStreetMap Wiki
If the sculptures in the sculpture park you are referring to are identical to those described in the Wikipedia article and are of permanent nature (not being replaced to other locations regularly) you can add all the sulptures to a site relation and add the wikipedia link to this relation.
I added the sculptures to a my new relation. However, there’s one sculpture which is a bit away from the others and I don’t seem to be able to use the same site there? Is there a distance limitation for members?
if you’re using iD (the editor on osm.org), the add to relation interface shows you nearby relations. if it’s far enough away, it won’t show it
I think you can select the far-away artwork, move the view near to the others, then select the correct relation. if that doesn’t work, you can select the far-away artwork and one of the closer artworks and add them both to the same relation
Quoting myself here. Spent a few hours this morning to understand what it would take to build an app to show this data in a way so non-technical people can consume it…and quite blown away by how far AI took me just within 2 hours:
Obviously this proof of concept is far away from a releasable application but the question I got for the audience here is, should this be a specific OSMArtExplorer or a OSMTagExplorer with the ability to configure the set of tags one wants to see?
I lack the understanding of how different items would be tagged and whether one app would be suitable displaying the vast amount of different entities OSM captures.
By the way, if this goes further it will become a free Android app primarily released on F-Droid, maybe I bite the bullet and also do Playstore
