Differentiating sport infrastructure (like pitches) by type of sport

[matthijsmelissen]

Currently all sport fields are shown in the same style. It is very difficult to distinguish the different sports. Furthermore there are good sport icon sets out there: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Sport_icon Comparing the different olympic pictograms http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/24/sports/olympics/pictograms-interactive.html I suggest to take the icon sets of Olympic games 1972 (munich) http://olympic-museum.de/pictograms/Picto1972.htm adopted to the constraints of 16px

See also https://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/3159.

[HolgerJeromin]

For some sport (basketball, football, rugby, soccer, tennis) there are working line renderings available. This link show soccer and tennis lines:

http://tile.openstreetmap.fr/?zoom=19&lat=50.77898&lon=6.0707&layers=B0000000FFFFFFF

The code is here:
https://github.com/cquest/osmfr-cartocss

[polarbearing]

The line rendering itself is fine and self-explanatory, though I would prefer not to add plenty new colours to the main map.

[Rovastar]

I think a longer term goal (no pun intended) is for the osm fr style.

Icons might be nice but most of the well known ones will be copyrighted/trademarked.

[Rovastar]

Oh meant to say the line style is for v3.x as it will require adding new stuff to the database.

[boothym]

How about adding icons for the most used sports to begin with? Soccer, tennis, baseball, basketball, all have good icons that can be used from iD editor's icon set. Just like iD the icon can be put in the middle of the pitch.

https://github.com/bhousel/maki/blob/mb-pages/src/soccer-24.svg
https://github.com/bhousel/maki/blob/mb-pages/src/tennis-24.svg
https://github.com/bhousel/maki/blob/mb-pages/src/baseball-24.svg
https://github.com/bhousel/maki/blob/mb-pages/src/basketball-24.svg

[kocio-pl]

Unfortunately they all are 24px, while we use just 14px - this is huge difference. If you want to see how they would look in this style, try to rescale them and save as PNG.

[boothym]

I linked to them because I thought you'd want the largest svg size available, but here's what they look like at 14px:

There's also https://github.com/mapbox/maki/tree/master/icons with more stick figures instead of the bat/ball icons.

[kocio-pl]

I'm surprised, they look quite nice and are perfectly recognizable! That's the power of skilled designer probably. =}

Still we need to decide if we want to use icons or field markings.

[Wuzzy2]

I'm very strongly for icons. Field markings are poorly recognizable and potentionally ambigious. Also, the field markings are not actually based on OSM data so they are basically lies, stricly spoken. The real field markings might either not exist at all or they are just wrong.
For example, not all soccer fields actually have field markings, especially small ones. Also, the field markings will be hard to be understood for people not knowing a particular sport very well.
Also, field markings do not fit into the “tradition” of the default OSM style of only showing what's actually there in the data, rather than “interpreting” stuff into the data which simply isn't there.

On the other hand, icons are WAY more recognizable, even by people not knowing awfully much about the sport. Also, the default style already uses icons for everything, so this just seems consequent. :-)

[HolgerJeromin]

For example, not all soccer fields actually have field markings, especially small ones.

Maps are no rendered satellite images.

Also, the field markings will be hard to be understood for people not knowing a particular sport very well.
On the other hand, icons are WAY more recognizable, even by people not knowing awfully much about the sport.

As an counter example there are many racket sports. I am not sure which is meant by the tennis icon from boothym. But the line marking is pretty unique.

Also, field markings do not fit into the “tradition” of the default OSM style of only showing what's actually there in the data, rather than “interpreting” stuff into the data which simply isn't there.

Think of the markings as a big icon :-P

[Wuzzy2]

For example, not all soccer fields actually have field markings, especially small ones.

Maps are no rendered satellite images.

Exactly. And I think field markings try way too hard to look “authentic”. Under the same logic, OSM could attempt to draw road markings on roads. I know, I know, field markings look cool, but they are not exactly useful for a map when you actually want to read information from it.
Icons are more abstract, therefore a more logical choice for a map.

As an counter example there are many racket sports. I am not sure which is meant by the tennis icon from boothym. But the line marking is pretty unique.

I guess the tennis icon stands for “tennis”. ;-) You already said “tennis” by yourselves! xD Also because this is probably the most well-known one.
Yes, it's probably hard to draw an icon for every sport in existance but OSM could just start with the most common ones while adding icons later. Sports without an icon could maybe get a generic icon or no icon.

The homepage really should improve its map key because the default style has so many different icons, but almost no icon is actually explained. :-( In fact, the map key is very, VERY incomplete (sadly).
Creating a key for the icons would (hopefully) not be too hard (it just needs to be done).
But creating a key for the markings or all sport pitches would be overkill and therefore it would be pretty unlikely to happen. I fear that Average Joe will fail to recognize the lion's share of possible sport pitches.

Think of the markings as a big icon :-P

Pfff, this is weak. The markings are nothing like icons. Icons are not rotated and have a fixed size and are always put on a point. Markings can be rotated, are made of lines and differ in size and take an area.

[boothym]

As an counter example there are many racket sports. I am not sure which is meant by the tennis icon from boothym. But the line marking is pretty unique.

Other racket sports have slightly different rackets (e.g. longer handle in badminton) and most of them are played indoors. If you see a pitch in OSM with a racket and ball, and it's not inside a building it's highly likely to be tennis (given 230,000 courts have been mapped!).

Anyway, the main thing is that I think icons should be added as soon as possible for the most important sports in OSM. They presumably are easier to add than markings and would definitely improve the map styling.

[boothym]

Is someone able to render these so we can see what they look like? @kocio-pl ?

[kocio-pl]

What should the colors be (re)used then?

I hope pitch color will be made less dominant soon, but green symbols with green label could be hardly readable.

[boothym]

I was thinking basically how they are just now - dark gray/black (with transparency)?

[Hufkratzer]

Can you please also add an icon for riding arenas (tagged leisure=pitch + sport=equestrian 🐴) ?

The taginfo statistics for leisure=pitch + sport=* is:
soccer; 276k
tennis: 234k
baseball: 91k
basketball: 76k
multi: 32k
golf: 23k (but golf courses shall not be tagged as pitches)
equestrian: 15k 🐴
volleyball: 12k
athletics: 7k

The icon may be:
a) horse shoe
b) horse head 🐴 <- github horse head
c) horse without rider
d) horse with rider 🏇 <- github horse rider

For a) and b) here are two possibilities shown together with the other icons:
from http://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Horseshoe-silhouette-vector-graphics/14822.html
from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1_Cav_Shoulder_Insignia.svg
from https://github.com/bhousel/maki/blob/mb-pages/src/soccer-24.svg
from https://github.com/bhousel/maki/blob/mb-pages/src/tennis-24.svg
from https://github.com/bhousel/maki/blob/mb-pages/src/baseball-24.svg
from https://github.com/bhousel/maki/blob/mb-pages/src/basketball-24.svg

For c) and d) I was not able yet to produce a good looking 14px png export from any of the free svg sources I have found. Perhaps my fault, I am not an experienced icon designer. But I nevertheless wanted to submit this request already. Here are some horse icons:

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Horseicon.svg
• https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/blob/c8e4f76c230512dc82dc060bf337e3ba489b113e/svg/iD-sprite.src.svg used in iD for bridleway and riding route
• https://github.com/mapbox/maki/blob/master/icons/horse-riding-15.svg for leisure=horse_riding
• https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Sinnbild_-_Reiter,_StVO_1970.svg
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sinnbild_Reiter.svg
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ratsastuspaikka_774f_tunnusosa.svg

Also please take into account that pitches can be indoors (in a hall or under a roof), in these cases markings can not be used, but icons probably can.

[imagico]

We would need to be careful here because it might not be clear what feature the icon applies to, i.e. the pitch itself or the facility the pitch is part of.

Also note the horse as a symbol - no matter if with a rider or not - can mean a lot of different things and does not necessarily imply something sport related.

[Hufkratzer]

Not every riding arena (equestrian pitch) is part of a riding facility or anything similar, like also not every other kind of pitch is part of a sports centre, leisure park or so. Especially in these cases it would be helpful if the map would show what kind of pitch it is.

I agree that it would be good if the icon would look related to equestrian sports, perhaps a jumping horse, but I don't know if that can be done in a 14px icon.

[boothym]

@kocio-pl I know I've asked before but any chance the icons I posted could be rendered?

I noticed there is a 0.3 opacity white outline to the black icon in the svg which I had to remove first.
Preview I created in photoshop:

[kocio-pl]

Sorry, I'm currently busy with many other problems, which I think are more important.

It's not clear what people would decide, but the best chances would be to create 14 px versions of icons (leisure green is probably better than black - and we already have golf icon), create the code, test them and make a PR with renderings. Could you try to do it?

[Tomasz-W]

I was looking at Taginfo sport=* key list to choose which tags can have an special icon in combination with leisure=sport_centre / leisure=pitch . It's very interesting, beacuse there are some sports which I even didn't hear about earlier (eg. netball or gaelic games), more popular than eg. boxing or car racing. I think we should prepare a list of sport=* tags which we want special icon for, and for the rest use just generic leisure-green dot for leisure=sports_centre (see: #2930) and current "blank" leisure=pitch rendering.

Which sport centres and pitches you would like to see with a special icon?

[HolgerJeromin]

Line markings are still not rejected #1126

[HolgerJeromin]

@jidanni
This alternate solution in tracked in #1126

[imagico]

I have shown now a demonstration for a possible approach to this in

http://blog.imagico.de/single-symbol-patterns-in-maps/

I am not going to submit this as a PR here as is because i am not sure if this would be a good change under the goals we have and there are numerous issues that would need to be looked at. But it is a demonstration technically and design wise how you can approach this issue without resorting to the primitive POI symbol solution so far discussed which as is being discussed in #3635 is non-sustainable to extend further in this style. Someone interested in differentiating sport pitches might take this as inspiration to develop a solution here. In any case if you do so please consider the points mentioned in #3651 (comment).

[Adamant36]

Genius solution. How do you think it would conflict with the goals of the style and what issues need to be looked at before it can be implemented?

[jeisenbe]

Symbol examples:

Looks quite good. I would be happy to see a PR which implements this idea.

[jeisenbe]

Rendering sample from the link above:

[jeisenbe]

This sort of symbology could also be a good solution for dog parks, which currently have a repeated symbol which leads to an excessively strong pattern.

[imagico]

The issue of sport=* being tagged on nodes and on features other than leisure=pitch is not addressed by this - see #3651 (comment).

[kocio-pl]

I like the way it looks for pitch areas - it enhances mapper feedback and at the same time is visually unobtrusive (unlike straight icons proposed earlier).

As of nodes - since we're currently not rendering them, we don't have to start to render them from now on.

[kocio-pl]

How this rendering would work with named objects (~19% of sport=* tags have name)?

[imagico]

The change discussed does not modify label rendering for pitches - see fc2657d.

Regarding labeling of pitches - see #4210.

[kocio-pl]

Is anybody willing to prepare such PR? I'd like to test it.

[Hufkratzer]

As already mentioned earlier (in #844 (comment)):

Please don't forget a symbol for sport=equestrian.

The current taginfo values for sport in combination with pitch are:

value	frequency
soccer	443k
tennis	356k
basketball	159k
baseball	134k
multi	67k
equestrian	32k
beachvolleyball	21k
volleyball	20k
skateboard	16k
american_football	16k
boules	15k
table_tennis	13k
bowls	12k
athletics	9k
cricket	9k
shooting	5k

A possible symbol for "equestrian" may be found in #2344 (comment)

[sekerob]

Hi, apologies for waking up this thread again, really liking your rendering design and often revisit to see how things come out, noticed that sometimes a pitch of a certain sport does not render, just the green square and wondered if there is some minimum size. Have a situation where a basketball pitch renders at a school, but not at a park 2 miles away where a same size tennis court does render. Another where a full size soccer pitch renders, but not the 'street soccer' sized at same school and park. Sample http://tile.openstreetmap.fr/?zoom=19&lat=42.46991&lon=14.20103&layers=B0000000FFFFFFF

thanks for reading.

[imagico]

Your link goes to the french style (https://github.com/cquest/osmfr-cartocss). You will have to inquire about issues with their pitch rendering there.