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by jraph 285 days ago
For water specifically, it works well on CoMaps / Organic Maps (search > categories > water).

It's too bad we don't have a convenient UI for desktop. OSM has to be the only thing that's more convenient to use on mobile for no good technical reasons. Just nobody has done it yet.
1 comments
pbmonster 285 days ago
> Maps (search > categories > water)

For my home town, that displays historic wells (deep, dry, no bucket, barred and locked) but not the little tab in the sandbox of the playground and not the public restroom in the center.

So on first sight it's less useful than "fountain". But I'll play around with it on my next tour.

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jraph 285 days ago
It'd be worth checking if these nodes are actually correctly mapped. For instance, historical wells that are dry, locked, etc should probably not be labeled with amenity=drinking_water. And the missing one should probably be updated to have it.

More on this at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Ddrinking_w...

In case you don't already know this and for others, you can use the editor at https://osm.org or the Every Door app on your mobile phone during your next tour for this (you'll need an OSM account to edit the map).

I'm not 100% sure the CoMaps "Water" category uses amenity:drinking_water, but I have relied on it for this many times during bike tours or hikes without much surprise :-)

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pbmonster 284 days ago
> I'm not 100% sure the CoMaps "Water" category uses amenity:drinking_water, but I have relied on it for this many times during bike tours or hikes without much surprise

Is there a way to search for the "amenity:drinking_water" tag directly in OSMand or CoMaps (or any other app)? Because this would probably fix everything.

In the end, the apps suffer from the complexity of the underlying data. It probably wasn't a good idea to have drinking water (tourism), drinking water (store) and drinking water (man made), fountain, water tab, well, ... and probably a dozen different categories for map makers to chose from.

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jraph 284 days ago
Well, the reality is complex and OSM wants to be precise :-)

Apps shall then make it easy to look for stuff and OSM labels are quite low level, they usually have their specific/internal representation of things. All this to say:

- I doubt CoMaps allows searching for "amenity:drinking_water", at least I haven't found a way to do this.

- That's what the higher level and more user-friendly Water category is supposed to be for. This will limit possibilities, but optimize for the common cases. If the Water category surfaces wrong things or doesn't surface things it should, it's a bug that needs to be fixed.

- You might have better luck with apps for editing OSM for working with OSM labels directly but appart from basic use of Street Complete and Every Door, I haven't explored complex OSM app editors like Vespucci on mobile.

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