I’m not really complaining here, at least - since I haven’t stumbled across this problem for several years of being a mapper, but from the point of view of having a better tagging system it worth mentioning. And it is not a proposal. So, it’s just an example. Please, be wise and treat it accordingly.

Man-made structures are super-common landscape features, even far away from the populated areas. And we have numerous tags to indicate such features. However, there is the whole class of man-made objects, barely represented in the OSM: various cables.

We have at least three tags for very specific cable structures: barriers made of poles and a cable, intercontinental communication cables, aerial power lines. At the same time, there is no way to indicate that there is a cable hanging somewhere without knowing it’s a power cable or a barrier. Obviously, there are cases, when these tags are used to map for a renderer because someone wanted to indicate that there is a cable no matter what.

Somehow, we’ve managed to get a decent tag for a pipeline. It doesn’t involve any implications about its purpose or any other property - it’s just a pipeline, nothing more. So, if I don’t know what kind of pipeline is this, it is totally acceptable to tag it using man_made=pipeline and location=overground - that’s what I see.

But there is no way to map a cable, hanging between the poles along the street since, without any special knowledge, you can’t tell, if it’s a temporary power cable, communication fiber-optic cable, analog CCTV cable or something else. Sometimes, it is impossible to tell even if you know a lot about this topic. And it usually doesn’t really matter, what does this particular cable serve for. That’s because this kind of data will always be very fragmentary (unless it’s not imported) and outdated due to lack of public interest.

The current situation, when power lines have some kind of special treatment, seems to be a result of historical circumstances - many decades ago, only power cables, telephone, and telegraph cables were located on street poles. Later, overhead phone cables were moved underground while telegraph lines were eliminated almost completely. So, modern common mapping products, including the OSM database, still have just power lines, having the rest of cabling out of scope.

There is an important thing about that. Some people saying that any more abstract scheme is always more complicated. It obviously isn’t true because there is nothing simpler than to indicate that “there is a cable”. If you know the purpose of that cable, it is also very simple to indicate it with a separate tag, if you don’t know - just leave it as is. Thus, better abstraction could potentially simplify mapping of cable structures instead of keeping it impossible, provoking mapping for a renderer, or making it more complicated.