Because then we’d end up with a man_made=sawmill (the structure/machine) within a man_made=sawmill (the facility/site).
Not really, in each of those cases it’s one tag for the “grounds” (e.g. amenity=hospital) and one for the objects within (e.g. building=hospital). It’s the amenity=hospital tag that would be the equivalent of man_made=works+product=wood or industry=sawmill or whatever.
But I think using sawmill as an example just confuses the discussion since it can be used somewhat interchangeably for both the structure/machine and site/facility.
Let’s use a place that produces steel instead (Steel mill - Wikipedia). How would you tag that currently?
Currently, it is most widely used as such, exactly.
I also don’t think there is anything wrong with eventually getting rid of this tag value at some point. To me, man_made seems to be the kind of key where things to, which don’t fit anywhere else.
(However, this is of course a way more far-reaching change than my changes which resulted in this thread being created)
I think there is a misunderstanding. The “industrial facilities” which you mean when referring to man_made, are things like chimmnys, conveyor belts, storage tanks, pipes, towers, cranes, etc - individual features on the ground.
The “industrial facilities”, which are supposed to be covered by a industrial=* key or similar, are the facilities/establishments, which consist out of those single, individual features: steel mills, chemical industries, paper mills, shipyards, etc.
This was not appropiate, I apologize.
I agree with this. In the US, I also came across many industrial landuse areas which have names like “X industrial park” etc. I think place=quarter or similar is better for them. Often areas, which are considered part of the industrial park, are also tagged landuse=industrial, even if they are just farmland or wood (this is then obivously wrong).
man_made=works+product=steel would be a valid combination, according to current documentation. However, this has a major flaw: Is it a steel mill? Is it just a place where other steel parts are built together or treated otherwise? Is it something entirely else? Key differences, and this is why a tag to determine the type of industrial establishment is needed. type =/= product Here is a tagging example on OSM, how I tagged it: man_made=works+industrial=steel_mill+product=steel_bars. (Product on steel mills can be more specific than just “steel”, most mills are specified to something like bars, plates, tubes, train tracks, etc., as far as I know)
You can do this with almost all product values: The type of industry/industrial facility is almost always ambigious when determined solely from product values. (other than some exceptions, like “brick” or “concrete”, probably)
The type of industry is also more important than the exact product, IMO.
(As i’ve said), I think, this scheme can continue to be used for now (for now, until a better way is found/implemented. Currently we don’t have any way to reliably tag most industrial establishments), but an extra “industrial/industry” tag is what’s needed to supplement it. (and this “industrial” key exists already (even a documentation existed, but then this discussion was triggered about it)
Besides that, non-factory industrial establishments are also supported by industrial= (example)
I don’t think this is an approach which would require excessively much work to implement, as it dosen’t really change any tag/key meanings, introduces new ones, or makes others redundant.
So if I understand it correctly, you are here just proposing to establish industrial as a subtag to man_made=works, rather than as a top level key? That would be a big plus, since it would mean that it’s backwards compatible to the current tagging scheme (one can still tag it the same, but one can also add additional information using industrial=.
It could be interesting to consider adding process= and some key for the input material (raw_material=? input=?) instead though; as that’d mirror the current product=, but I haven’t sat down and considered if all cases would be covered that way.
Yes and no - I’d primarly use man_made=works to differentiate between manufacturing and non-manufacturing establishments (factories/not factories), besides that it is also backwards compatible.
To differentiate otherwise, data consumers would need to maintain a list with which industrial values are manufacturing and which aren’t, using this way, they only need to look for this addidional tag, that’s my idea here.
So it’s more like the other way around, man_made=works can be viewed as a subtag to the industrial key as the industrial key includes more than just “works”.
Weather that makes sense, weather this “works” tag is useful enough or not, weather it should be named or used differently, like it was proposed - I personally don’t have much of an opinion on that.
It’s the amenity=hospital tag that would be the equivalent of man_made=works+product=wood or industry=sawmill or whatever.
yes, I also thought whether we could use man_made=works for sawmills, e.g. with works=sawmill
(and if you want product=wood but this seems implied anyway), the wiki says it is for production sites, I guess a sawmill could qualify or maybe not? My dictionary seems to suggest that production in this context is about manufacturing, assembling, construction, creation and would, was it exhaustive, not include cutting or grinding (flour) or similar, but maybe it is just too small.
This is part of a larger phenomenon, that names are often given to developments or complexes rather than places per se. Historically, most developments in the U.S. were either imported as place=hamlet from GNIS or mapped by hand as named landuse areas, given that a development has a well-defined shape. However, this clashes with the use of landuse areas to represent land cover.
Some common scenarios:
A planned residential subdivision (British English: housing estate) is often mapped as landuse=residentialname=*. Based on this practice, apartment complexes are tagged landuse=residentialresidential=apartmentsname=* and mobile home parks are tagged landuse=residentialresidential=trailer_parkname=*. There are standard editor presets for these tagging combinations, and I don’t know of a popular alternative.
A shopping mall or strip mall is tagged as landuse=retailname=*. Sometimes shop=mall is dual-tagged on a shopping mall’s landuse area, but there isn’t a similar tag for strip malls.
A school campus is tagged as landuse=educationname=*, at least when it has a distinct identity from an individual educational institution.
A churchyard is tagged as landuse=religiousname=* to distinguish it from the sanctuary, which is tagged amenity=place_of_worship.
So unsurprisingly, many industrial parks have been tagged as landuse=industrialname=*. It’s worth noting that some industrial parks are actually quite small, consisting of only a few buildings, forming only part of a neighborhood. Some are located in a suburban, or exurban, or rural area where place=quarter or place=neighbourhood would seem out of place. There’s often an industrial park next to a major airport, no matter how remote.
And yet: landcover is often micromapped within a farm, with individual fields tagged as landuse=farmland, making landuse=farmlandname=* less suitable for representing the farm as a whole. place=farm is the documented alternative, but I don’t think actual usage is as clear-cut (no pun intended) as the wiki insists. In the U.S., there are currently five times more named landuse=farmland areas than place=farm features – about half with “Farm” in the name. Many of these farms are also tiny and unremarkable, no more a “place” than a supermarket or city park would be a place.
A major reason for the tendency toward named landuse areas is simply that renderers know what to do with them, since they imply a measure of homogeneity that place areas do not. For example, labels sized by area in osm-carto et al. have been nice for giving users a lay of the land that’s orthogonal to a city’s usual place hierarchy, but the collisions between landuse and landcover mapping aren’t ideal.
=works + works=sawmill is better than standalone industrial=sawmill , but having product=wood is a higher priority for me. It depends on how you define them, especially whether product= should be a category or items. How do you distinguish cutting logs and producing composite wood? The latter is inconvenient to express exactly in works= . There is no direct counterpart to =sawmill . Is eg works=factory (will yet add complications to using =works to replace industrial=factory as features) + product=wood enough? So alongside there is question in what does product=wood means, and should it be =lumber (or =timber ?) vs =plywood (already a 2nd level of composite wood) etc. Not to mention for final “wood product” , there is firewood, and wood pellets (not counting charcoal), where there is additional interface with fuel:*= .
Is eg works=factory (will yet add complications to using =works to replace industrial=factory as features)
I thought works and factory were synonymous in this context? Frankly, there are 215.000 man_made=works and 15.000 industrial=factory, we could deprecate the latter as it doesn’t add anything that isn’t already expressed with man_made=works.
product=wood enough? So alongside there is question in what does product=wood means, and should it be =lumber (or =timber ?) vs =plywood (already a 2nd level of composite wood) etc. Not to mention for final “wood product” , there is firewood, and wood pellets (not counting charcoal), where there is additional interface with fuel:*= .
a sawmill could produce all of these, big beams for construction, boards and from the remaining material chipboards, pellets for combustion etc.
While nobody in this discussion (myself included) likes how it’s named, man_made=works works well as a top-level tag for an industrial facility which manufactures something. It can be applied to a landuse area, a building, or as a standalone point.
What is missing, though, is the top-level tag for an industrial facility which is not a factory. Let’s take a storage facility as an example: building=warehouse is unsatisfactory as a top-level tag, because it only describes the type of building. An actual storage facility, however, apart from a warehouse building may be located in an open-air space (construction materials, timber, vehicles), or in a building not purpose-built as a warehouse (former barn, for example).
I do agree, however, that key:industrial has been seldom used as a top-level tag, and should not be introduced as such by fiat. I would support clearly defining it as a subkey of man_made=works or landuse=industrial. In the future, I would also support deprecating man_made=works in favor of something else (perhaps a different top-level tag for industrial facilities), but I consider this a low priority at the moment.
storage is indeed tricky, it has many faces / context, and is not
necessarily to be all crammed together. You can find storage from very
small to very big in many orders of magnitude.
This is also an option, using “works” key to determine the type of a manufactoring facility, and “industrial” or whatever key for type of non-manufacturing facilities. But then again, the category “type of industrial establishment” would be split into two keys, which is also not ideal.
I think the idea should be considered (however it is a larger impact into existing tagging guidelines than what I was proposing)
Fully agree, this is the problem when trying to determine “type of industry/establishment” of of product values. If they’re too general, they could refer to various types of facility, and many addidional information, which could be tagged, gets lost.
If the values are too specific, we’ll have countless values, which no data consumer can query reliably for anything, neither be able to determine industry types either. (There are currently 200k industrial tags with +1000 values, and 70k product tags with +7000 values)
man_made=works as a top level tag says “an industrial facility which manufactures something” - but that’s all. There is no way to reliably tag which type of industrial facility/establishment/factory. Is it a steel mill, a paper mill, a plastic processing plant, a automobile assembly plant etc etc? This is the problem which we need a solution for.
(This based on product values alone can be highly misleading/conflicting, as demonstrated above.) My attempt at such a solution, which tries to solve this for a start, with only minor changes to existing usages of various tagging schemes.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you here, but when man_made=works, which has a somewhat specific meaning (manufacturing facility) is supposed to be replaced by another tag which is used to more genrally identify “industrial facilities” -
then we’d have a top level “industrial_facility=yes” or whatever, and an “key:industrial” subtag to identify the type of industrial facility. This wouldn’t make sense, then just leave out the man_made=works replacement.
Look, I think your draft is entirely sensible (I did not read all the details). It introduces industrial as a top-level tag and then defines a number of commonly encountered values.
The problem with it is that it’s a sensible proposal, but it is not the way how the tag is actually used at the moment, and not the way data consumers of today expect it. I don’t know of any renderer that will display anything on a node or area tagged solely with industrial=canning, or display it as a “Canning factory ACME” in its search results. Wiki is supposed to document reality, not how it ought to be.
Now, maybe there is a possibility to redefine industrial as a top-level tag (akin to shop) and in the process redefine landuse=industrial as an orthogonal tag (just like you can have e.g. bare amenity=school node, or attached to a building=school, or to a landuse=education). But it takes an effort to
a) write a cogent proposal and
b) make a research and proposal
– how the proposed redefinition will affect tagging of the existing objects
– how data consumers are supposed to reinterpret the tag
c) convince the community that a) and b) are worthwhile undertaking.
So far, you made a good shot at a), but steps b) and c) are usually much harder ones. Unilateral rewriting the wiki page does not count as an attempt, sorry.
I still stand by my earlier point, I’m convinced that my changes to the key page are not significant enough to actually change the definition and change how the tag is used.
I changed the definiton on my page to further resemble the orginal one, now it’s “You can use industrial= to determine the type of an industrial facility.”
The orginal definiton, before it was changed without any form of discussion, -in a way MUCH more impactful then my change-, was “You can describing the type of industry using the tag industrial=” - and basically all examples on the page were industrial facilities.
Also today, almost all uses of the tag are to describe individual facilities.
I have further removed all mentions of industrial being a primary tag on my version, and also removed the list of “bad values”.
Further, almost all values on my version had already been used before I listed them there, and I checked to make sure my definition for those values matched the actual use.
So my version now is how the majority of this tag is used, how the tag was orginally documented, and I am not redefining this tag in any way.
The largest change I did is expanding the list of examples, so that people are able to tag everything, and not just a few very selected things.
I don’t know of any renderer which uses industrial values for anything special. Renderers should orientate themselfes on the wiki, we shouldn’t orientate us on the renderers. The current version of my changes documents reality, the reality how this tag is primarly used.
This is definitly possible, but at the latest now, all mentions of this have been removed from my version, and I’m not here to write proposals or even to redefine anything, I want to map using a somewhat reliable scheme.
Trying to make a reliable scheme - remember: this has been tried for over 11 years, and we haven’t moved one single step forward since.
actually “type of an industrial facility” is not the clear usage of this tag, 44% is oil and gas, not sure what “cooling”, “communication”, “distributor”, “agriculture”, “water” are about, but in the very long tail you find much more of these, “metal_processing”, manufacturing, chemical, electrical, logistics, food_industry, telecommunication, cement, mineral_processing, power, furniture, transport, construction, recycling, … many many industries rather than facilities, 79,8% in combination with landuse.
Lets exclude oil & gas here, gas has been formally deprecated by proposal, and oil is generally very questionable.
However, in the majority of cases, all those values -while often badly named, and nowhere documented- refer to actual, individual facilities, and not just “this random object is related to this industry”, or “this area is primarly covered by …furniture industry”. This is quickly verified by loading them into Overpass-Turbo, and looking at the objects. It gets obivous quickly that they’re almost all related to individual facilities. For example “transport” - this is a transport-related facility. “manufacturing” - this is a facility related to manufacturing, etc.
A key problem. Tons of undocumented values, which were made up at some point and then used by different people for different things, often probably because there was no documented alternative. What I found out:
“cooling”: Bad value. Used to tag various pieces of cooling equipment. Used 2,000 times, “man_made=cooling” alternative with ~6,000 uses exists and seems to be the same.
“(tele)communication”: Consistently used on the fenced yards around communication towers, combined with landuse=industrial - one of the rare cases, where a value is actually primarly used for “type of industrial land”. Unsure what this is supposed to be useful for however.
“distributor”: Used inconsistently for distribution centers, shop=trade/shop=wholesale. I added the more specific “distribution” to my page, for distribution centers.
“agriculture”: Used for various agricultural establishments, feed mills, grain elevators, farm buildings, farm yards. Too broad to be useful.
“water”: Even broader, used on water works, wastewater plants, agricultures, sewage pump stations, … Too broad to be useful, everything has own existing tags, utility=water also exists & is approved.
“metal_processing”: Primarly used on factories/facilities which process purchased metals. Therefore, I added it to my list of examples.
“manufacturing”: 1:1 duplicate of industrial=factory/man_made=works
“chemical”: Primarly used on chemical plants. Therefore, I added it to my list of examples.
“electrical/power”: Used in combination with various “power=*” features. Just use the power key?
“logistics/transport”: Used on trucking yards, distribution centers, other warehouses, auto distribution terminals, rail facilities, road maintenance depots, which can be tagged using existing, more specific tags.
“food_industry”: Used for various types of food factory, food distributors, food delivery for elderly people, farmyards, fish ports etc etc … very broad, more specific tags exist
“cement”: Used for cement plants, but also many mistagged concrete plants/cement terminals, where cement is not actually produced. I added “cement_plant” to my list of values, which is clearer.
“mineral_processing”: Used for various types of mineral processing plants. Not very ambigious, so I added it to my list.
“furniture”: Primarly used on furniture factories, so I added it to my list as such.
“construction”: Mostly used on construction sites. use landuse=construction/construction=*???
“recycling”: Mixture of recycling plants, recycling centres and scrap yards.
TLDR majority is used for individual facilities (and it was the orginal definition/the orginal examples). I think many of the cases where it is used otherwise, stem from the undiscussed changes to the key definition.
I do not think we should exclude “oil”, as it is by far and large the most used value for the key. I have no doubt there are people using “industrial” for individual industrial features, but they are not so many yet, and IMHO these should be retagged rather than encouraged.
sorry, but this is only “true” if you ignore those values you don’t like.
Prompted by this topic, I did a bit of industry mapping, from on-location and on-line survey. Here to the totally unscientific results. I actually managed to not create a multipolygon
I grew up with the notion, if the owner of the business him:her-self no longer works in the shop, then it is not a craft. No idea, if that makes a business an industry though.
Mentioned on-line source is very nice, in that the pictures there show how farmland gets into “Gewerbegebiet” (commercial/industrial). The farmland left over calls for MP, but I was not looking at that just before. Industry here is very fond of history.
PS: The mill in the 1896 picture from the history link was in its later time an oil-mill. The then operator a sibling of the original operator, still having big market share in brand vegetable oil. After it was decommissioned and laid dead ten or so years ago it was turned into a residential area by some German weapons-industrial, it will not call names. Mind you, not some guarded and fenced refugee, an ordinary residential area – No idea the adagio above co-op.
I plead guilty doing that – it seems all natural to tag a relatively large factory or whatever with tags such as: landuse=industrial man_made=works barrier=fence (I know…) industrial=chemical name=ACME fertilizers website=www.acmefertilizers.com
…
What do you propose as alternative? What would you retag that with?
Unlike e.g. residential, industrial facilities are typically large enough to sustain tagging of individual plots/yards, which then can be conveniently named. And a large(ish) factory will often have a dozen buildings, so it only makes sense to tag the whole yard.
Zluuzki’s analysis clearly shows that we have a problem, and that the OSM canonical approach of “any tags you like” did not turn out well in so complex field of industry classification. I am not sure what is the best way forward here. I can think of at least three different sensible tagging schemes, but I’m reluctant to put forward anything because I see it’s a huge undertaking to sell that to the community, and then to possibly retag thousands of objects.
