Proposal talk:Hot Spring

Use with natural=springs

I went looking for hot springs tag in the wiki and instead found your proposal. I agree that we need to distinguish hot springs over over the the others. However, I would rather see a type=hot and maybe a drinkable=yes/no. (or potable to be more exact.)

I was attempting to add Baker Hot Springs in Washington state. Being able to search for hot springs would definitely be a plus.

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You may use the tag natural=hot_spring on a single node. For a stream you would tag with waterway=stream, a pool natural=water. For the additional information of drinkable then drinking_water=yes, for temperature there is another proposed tag of temperature http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Temperature. Warin61 (talk) 05:31, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Proposal to abandon this tag

There are clearly various perceptions as to what constitutes a "hot spring" and this tag, especially combined with 'natural' is inappropriate for both scientific and recreational identification. There is the natural geological feature which is a spring that is subjectively hot, and there is the recreational tourism/leisure aspect which implies the former, but also includes the swimming aspect. I think the tagging should be setup in such a way that all possibilities can be accounted for with the least amount of subjectivity. Some hot springs are so small or undeveloped, they are merely hot water trickling out of a hillside, others may have swimming but are deemed cold or warm, while others are hot and have swimming. Thus I think the better way would be to classify all springs from the top down by first labeling springs regardless of temperature using natural=spring with optional additional information such as such as temperature=*. Then for the recreational aspect, add additional tags which help further classify it such as sport=swimming or leisure=swimming_pool. When it comes to subjectively classifying the temperature, I think there should be a dedicated tag which can encompass cold, warm, hot or a combination of those. However all the recreationally used hot springs I have come across are well known and advertised as being hot. Thus for simplicity I think using natural=spring along with leisure=hot_spring would suffice for both geological and most recreational purposes. So to sum up, I think this tag should be abandoned because there is too much specificity, subjectivity and ambiguity in using it. DFyson (talk) 21:16, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

natural=spring along with leisure=hot_spring is not a good alternative. There are millions of geological hot springs which are not used, advertised or ever suitable as a leisure place.

Overall I consider natural=spring + spring:type=hot the best alternative proposal and would prefer that to current state but I am not sure if it makes sense to change it now, haven't looked at taginfo for a long time. RicoZ (talk) 13:44, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

I mostly agree with DFyson. We should separate the natural feature natural=spring, its property temperature=*, and its usage amenity=public_bath. If the exact temperature is unknown, I would accept temperature=hot as a placeholder for the next tagger. --Biff (talk) 09:11, 13 July 2020 (UTC)