Proposal:Simple and Structured Taxon Tagging

Simple and Structured Taxon Tagging
Proposal status:	Draft (under way)
Proposed by:	Jofban, SebasOSM
Tagging:	species=*, species:<lang>=*, genus=*, genus:<lang>=* taxon:[subkey]=*
Applies to:
Definition:	Proposal to document the difference between simple and structured taxon tagging.
Statistics:
Draft started:	2025-10-30

Problem Statement

The taxon tagging is used to more specifically describe the kind of plant that an OSM object is referring to. The current tagging scheme has emerged over time for use by both botanists and non-botanists.

This however has lead to an unclear delineation between the tags, as well as being hard to parse in a consistent manner. In practice, values for all tags range from colloquial names to partial taxonomic ranks to the full taxonomic name.

The tagging needs to be intuitive enough for casual mappers to collect the data, while enabling experienced mappers to structure the data for easier consumption by data consumers. Redundancy and tag proliferation should be avoided where possible.

"Taxon" referes to the relevant specimen described by the OSM object.

The taxon tagging only concerns itself with plants. Tagging animals is out of scope for this proposal.

Proposal

<--- This section needs to be restructured later --->

There are broadly two sets of tagging proposed:

Simple Taxon Tagging

The Simple Taxon Tagging is geared towards casual mappers without intricate knowledge of the taxonomic naming scheme and/or the specific plant at hand.

It consists of three tags:

• genus: The genus of the plant in Latin. Within a binominal name, it is the first component: Fraxinus angustifolia -> genus=Fraxinus
  • genus:<lang>: The colloquial name can be put into genus:<lang>. E.g. genus:en=Ash, genus:de=Esche, genus:es=Fresno
• species: The commonly used latin taxonomic name of the plant. This includes at least the binominal name, and may be expanded with further qualifiers like subspecies, variant, and others. E.g. species=Fraxinus angustifolia subsp. oxycarpa
  • species:<lang>: The colloquial name can be put into species:<lang>. E.g. species:en=Narrow-leaved ash, species:de=Schmalblättrige Esche, species:es=Fresno sureño
• taxon: If further disambiguation is needed, that can be put into this tag. It shouldn't be commonly used, use species=* instead.

Structured Taxon Tagging

The Structured Taxon Tagging lives under the taxon:* namespace. It allows partial matching and easier processing of the taxonomic ranks that combine into the taxonomic name.

Unknown or not applicable ranks should be omitted.

• taxon:genus: The latin genus of the taxon. The colloquial name may be put into genus:<lang>.
• taxon:species: The latin species of the taxon. This only contains the species part of the binominal name. It is recommended to also tag taxon:genus.
• taxon:subspecies: The latin subspecies of the taxon.
• taxon:form: The form of the taxon.
• taxon:variant: The latin variant of the taxon.
• taxon:cultivar: The cultivar part of the taxonomic name.

Each tag contains only the rank value, no formatting or delimiters like "subsp." or "var."

Rationale

The genus, species, and taxon keys are already in use with up to now little to no standardisation. Thus, they are kept mostly for human consumption. On the other hand, this makes them ideal for non-professionals to initially enter the information.

The species tag can then be used to record the information from e.g. a plaque without much thought. If even less information is available such that only the genus can be identified, that can be put into the genus tag.

For renderers and other consumers, it can be useful to group various specimen together, e.g. a renderer might want to use a certain model for all subspecies. Having to parse the various precisions and expressions that the species tag might contain is difficult and error prone. To that end, the various taxon:* subkeys enable consumers to easily discard unwanted information while still being able to fully reconstruct the original taxonomic name.

It is expected that interested mappers in this area convert the simple tagging to the structured tagging. In that regard, the Simple Taxon Tagging fulfills a similar role to fixme=*.

Comments

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