Putting animals on the map

OpenStreetMap aims to collect world wide local geographic knowledge and create a map by the people for the people. Practically there is, however, a substantial gap between that lofty ideal and the practical reality of mapping. A very good example to illustrate this mismatch between the ideal and reality of OpenStreetMap is animal related infrastructure. Animal husbandry is of enormous economic and social importance in huge parts of the world and accounts for a substantial portion of landuse world wide and wild animals and structures they create form a significant part of ecosystems. This is, however, not reflected in practical mapping in OpenStreetMap. Mapping of animal related infrastructure and landuse is quite marginal and most mapping and tagging concepts in that domain are quite shallow semantically compared to other fields of mapping. More than that, mapping of animal related infrastructure is dominated by infrastructure related to pets. This reflects the massive…