Is there a standardized way to show boundaries of National Monuments in the United States?
National Monuments in OSM should be mapped as protected areas, which are a type of boundary relation.
Some additional tags that should be added to the relation:
name=*for the full name of the monumentprotection_title=National Monumentprotect_class=3(in most cases)operator=*for the agency that runs the monument (National Park Service, US Forest Service, US Bureau of Land Management, etc)ownership=nationalprotected=perpetuitywebsite=*wikidata=*wikipedia=*
Hereâs an example of a National Monument boundary thatâs already mapped in OSM: Mount Saint Helens National Volcanic Monument
Wikipediaâs List of national monuments of the United States may also be of interest.
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I recently tagged all US National Parks with network=National Parks of the United States and network:wikidata=Q34918903. If people like this pattern then we could extend it to National Monuments and other US protected areas as an unambiguous way to group/query them.
There is a thorough write up on how to tag these over at United States/Public lands - OpenStreetMap Wiki by @ZeLonewolf and @stevea. Steve or Brian anything to add to the above?
Thanks for being in the loop here, both @ElliottPlack and Quincy. Itâs can be challenging to gain consensus on such broad topics and the writeup of that wiki was both a bit tedious and the results still remain rather âwet paint.â @quincylvania, if you were to update that wiki with your recent tagging, well, letâs say âit couldnât hurtâ and thank you in advance.
Inch by inch, we improve both our map (with data and improved tagging) and our wikis to document both our consensus and intentions.
As OP, @JohnTJr , Iâll say there is âsomewhere aroundâ a standardized way to tag these, and the Public Lands wiki Elliott refs is our best expression of how we do that (for public lands in the US). As we keep this wiki updated, it should serve us well, by sharpening up how data are and should be tagged in our map. Again, thanks to everybody who maps and wikis in OSM!
I agree with @stevea that this probably doesnât really hurt. Although it does seem to be basically the same information as the combination operator=National Park Service[1] + protection_title=National Park.
Perhaps this ought to be further qualified as
US National Park Servicejust in case another country has an agency of the same name. â©ïž
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I agree with @stevea that this probably doesnât really hurt. Although it does seem to be basically the same information as the combination
operator=National Park Service+protection_title=National Park.
In this case, yes, the tags line up, but this is not guaranteed. For National Monuments there are multiple operators and multiple protection_title values, such as protection_title=National Volcanic Monument for Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.
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Also, the NPS operates various properties that arenât national parks, and some national parks like Cuyahoga Valley are made up of units operated by county park districts.
Thatâs certainly an interesting use of the network tag, and one that would need amendment to the linked wiki page if adopted. I do think itâs redundant to add both a base tag with free-form text and the :wikidata variant of the tag. I understand adding it for existing tagging (e.g. having both operator and operator:wikidata because operator has existed for a long time as a tag). Iâm really not a fan of proliferating of that pattern for yet another base tag, and it risks the two tags getting out of sync.
If the goal of the base tag is readability on osm.org, I do remind folks that thereâs a browser plugin that will do this for you:
Agreed, we spent quite a long time thinking about park and protected area tagging, but the current guidance is more âa couple guys thinking really hard and deep about the problemâ than âwide community consensusâ. But so far it seems to have stuck.
If Iâm reading the tea leaves correctly, Iâm guessing there is probably a desire to have sufficient tagging to distinguish different categories of public lands for rendering. I would agree with what @ezekielf hinted at, where the operator:wikidata/protection_title combinations (or the straight operator tag if you must) provides sufficient information at render time to make that distinction.
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I see, yes the multiple possible operators for National Monuments makes them more complex. Iâm less sure about varying protection_titles. If a âNational Volcanic Monumentâ is the same as a âNational Monumentâ just with an extra flavor word, then Iâd expect it to be tagged protection_title=National Monument. If instead it is a distinct class of protected area then I suppose its exclusion from a list of regular National Monuments would be appropriate.
Quincy, there are also a number of examples of crushingly huge (in size and scope / scale) and quite complex such entities, for example, the local-to-me and I-recently-renamed-again (after Obama declared it a National Monument in his waning days) Relation: âȘCotoni-Coast Dairies Unit, California Coastal National Monument⏠(âȘ7062718âŹ) | OpenStreetMap. This is not only a relation (itself composed of outer and inner polygons) but should be (but isnât currently) part of a larger relation that consists of many, many more such âunits,â as well as the entirety of the California coastline (over 1000 miles)! My mind boggles at how OSMâs super-relation nesting can or should get three or maybe even four levels deep with these â whew!
I keep freshly-updating the names (and other attributes via their tags) of these as they are local-to-me, I notice they need updating and as they are coalesced together quicker than my ânoticingâ or âmappingâ speed. So, I will say that not only is this a very large elephant to take bites of, but a non-zero number of the units of these change flavor (name=*, as part of other âunitsâ of protected_areaâŠ) rather unpredictably.
âPADsâ (Protected Area Databases, some at the state level, see for example California/Using CPAD data - OpenStreetMap Wiki, some at the national level â @ZeLonewolf linked a national PAD in the linked wiki) do get updated (often annually), but again: this is a very large task and is a frequently moving target (at least in the case of my local version of the national monument we have in our little county here in California as it scales to include other units up and down a very lengthy coastline). Please be aware of the âgiant scopeâ of what you attempt to do. And remember that long journeys begin with initial small steps!
Thatâs not a bad ideal. But if we work on a tagging sheme, we should consider it not only for the USA but for all countries.
@karlos, I donât think anybody here disagrees with you (meaning I think everybody here AGREES with you). This is the US community (âchannelâ in our Discourse) and if anything is true about this highly complex topic (boundary=protected_area naming / tagging), it is this: the way that any given nation / region (and its sub-national and lower-level jurisdictions) organizes these involves a great deal of complexity. Even as recently as over the last couple of decades, this has been a rapidly-evolving process which challenges governments, GIS departments, political structures, consensus among the governed / governing and even the very categories themselves (the âboxesâ we put things into like ânational monumentsâ).
I believe that such âtagging schemes,â which OSM has and does continue to evolve (look at all the work weâve done with tags like protect_class and protection_title in the last decade) work best when they evolve both at the national / regional level, as well as at the global / international / OSM-wide level. We can work on one, the other, or both simultaneously without harming our forward momentum on either or any of them.
Being in OSM for 15+ years, my longer-term perspective tells me what seems to be happening is that countries / regions around the world are indeed developing our / their own (regional) strategies to better express these tagging schemes, while simultaneously âfitting these schemes intoâ the wider world of how OSM tags âinternationally.â There is work to be done at national / regional levels, there is work to be done OSM-wide. And, we do that work as we move forward.