Proposal talk:Temperature

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Pre Mark 2

Units 

Degrees Celsius are not an international standard unit for temperature (unlike Kelvins). Moreover, judging from the internet, the Americans very often specify temperature in degrees without bothering to mention Fahrenheit. Therefore I would discourage indication of temperature without the scale specification. --Kotya (talk) 10:24, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

The 'Degrees Celsius' unit is an SI unit, not a base unit but then few things are, e.g. minutes, hours are not base SI units. See http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/units.html for an American explanation. Kelvin is not in common use due to the numbers being too cumbersome for day to day use of common temperatures, thus Celsius is used. Warin61 (talk) 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Celsius is certainly the best candidate for a default value, but I'm in favor of always specifying units. With existing tags such as width, the default is needed due to the large amount of existing data, but when defining a new key from scratch, I don't see a reason to omit the unit. Typing the unit is easily worth it to avoid potential ambiguity.

On a related note, perhaps spelling the units with the degree sign (e.g. 20 °C) would be the better choice, as that is the official sign for the units. --Tordanik 18:15, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Official unit with degree sign should be used. Editors or a bot should be allowed to add missing "°" or whitespace automatically. Using "°F" should be possible, but deprecated. Editors or a bot should be allowed to convert "°F" to "°C" automatically. Missing unit should be deprecated. Editors or a bot should be allowed to add "°C" automatically except in countries using "°F" regularly.--Slhh (talk) 22:05, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Non-numerical values 

• Just for additional consideration: Though I can very well see the logic behind introducing the non-numeric values, I see a potential problem with specifying them: what is the value for tap water? It's probably not ambient but also neither chilled nor cold according to the current specification. Could an additional value "cool" be used? --Kotya (talk) 10:30, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Broad brush? The 'ambient temperature' inside a house (not air conditioned) is different from the 'ambient temperature' outside the same house? If you accept that then could not the 'ambient temperature' of water be different from that of the air? To make further confusion, the water temperature at night coming out of the ground will usually be warmer than the outside air temperature. So, best expression? Ambient? Warin61 (talk) 2 February 2015 (UTC)

• Also for "boiling" I'd remove the 100 °C specification, since it's confusing (high in the mountains, it may be significantly lower). Boiling is a good spec on its own. --Kotya (talk) 10:30, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Not worried about the '100 °C specification' .. though I'd not accept it as a true 'specification'. Warin61(talk) 2 February 2015 (UTC)

• Tap water or spring water could use a special value "ground" or "earth" denoting normal ground temperature, which is long-time averaged ambient. Being based on ground temperature anomaly hot water springs should be tagged "warm" or "hot" instead. Springs of melt water could use "cold".--Slhh (talk) 21:39, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

hot and cold tags 

Comment _ The words hot and cold are common usage words that everyone understands in everyday life. You give the definition of hot as being "hotter, but not safe to consume or handle" and "cold" as being "substantially colder, may not be safe to handle". Due to it's common usage I would have expected "hot" and "cold" to be closer to it's common usage understanding of the words so that there will be no confusion in people tagging.

• +1 --Kotya (talk) 10:41, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Any domestic private or communal shower, bath, tap, etc would have "hot" as "safe to handle but not necessarily safe to consume" and "cold" as "safe to handle and consume" then anyone who knows that a shower or tap facility has hot and cold water can tag it as such without an actual understanding of the temperature range of the water.

heating and cooling 

I'm generally more interested in the provision (or lack of) heating and cooling. For example: is the shower heated? Does the motel have air conditioning? Is the water chilled at the fountain? Is boiling water available here? Only for a few things, like a hot spring, is an exact temperature a nice to have.

heating=yes/no
cooling=yes/no

In short I think the temperature tag should be rarely if ever used. And in most cases it is, there should temperature:max and temperature:min instead.

Brycenesbitt (talk)

+1

As first-level tagging the temperature control is the most important feature: ambient=yes/no and/or heating=yes/no and/or cooling=yes/no.

The actual temperature or temperature range (either numeric value or descriptive like freezing/boiling) could optionally come after as complementary tag.

--Althio (talk) 22:33, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

I would support heating=yes and cooling=yes, that way we could tag "This public shower has warm water" and "This alpine hut has a built-in heating system", also "This shop provides A/C". --Gormo (talk) 08:29, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

examples? 

What are some real live examples (OSM node numbers), to help illustrate the application of the tagging as proposed? 08:22, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

Temperature ranges and adjustability 

Specifying temperature ranges needs to be possible. Syntax could be similar to conditional restrictions (example: temperature=cold-hot or temperature=cold-hot), but we need to differentiate two types of temperature ranges: Range of fluctuation and range of adjustability. Range of adjustability might be tagged temperature=adjustable:ambient-50 °C for example. Simply using a value adjustable is likely insufficient information for some applications like a sauna.--Slhh (talk) 23:06, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Is there really any information gained when tagging something as "this may be cold or hot or anything in between"? --Gormo (talk) 08:31, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

This line "temperature=76°Fahrenheit The space between value and unit is missing. temperature=76 °F" Is wrong! The correct value should be temperature=76 F. User 5359 (talk) 16:19, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

New Comments

Heat or A/C

I most frequently want to tag something this scheme does not cover easily: temperature=heated temperature=cooled temperature=conditioned For locations offering respectively a heater, a chiller, or both. Brycenesbitt (talk) 07:52, 9 April 2015 (UTC)