On 12/01/2014 11:52, John Aldridge wrote:
Is there a consensus on how to tag Royal Mail & Parcel Force delivery offices?
>> >> (lots of interesting replies)
Thank you for all the thoughtful responses. I can see both sides of this debate!
On the one hand, there is still a fairly clear common understanding (in this country, at least) of what a "Post Office" is, and to use the tag amenity=post_office for anything else would perhaps seem a little perverse. This does, however, leave us without an obvious tag for the other things: delivery offices, parcelforce depots, to say nothing of DHL, UPS & the rest.
On the other hand, the "special" status of post offices is eroding slowly, and it's only an accident that the company "Post Office Limited" happens to share a spelling with "post_office". Giving one letter/parcel handling company special recognition over the others also seems odd, especially given the international nature of OSM.
I'm also motivated by the desire to make OSM generally useful, and whilst I agree with the advice not to tag for the renderer, there's little point tagging anything in a way which is never going to be available to most users. I actually came to this issue because I wanted to check where the local delivery office was, and what its opening hours were. If I believed there was a snowflake in hell's chance of getting amenity=post_depot objects displayed on the default map, I'd be more sympathetic, but as it is I think I'd prefer something like...
1. Anywhere the general public can send or receive a letter or package is amenity=post_office. This is consistent with the Wiki, which says, for Tag:amenity=post_office, "A post office. A place where letters and parcels may be sent or collected."
2. operator= is mandatory for anything other than regular post offices. The Wiki says this tag should be present "if a private company operates it." I know that Post Office Limited is a private company these days, but insisting on it for regular post offices seems excessive.
3. post_office= is mandatory for anything other than regular post offices, and is the term used by the operator to describe the service. I'm uncertain about the name of this tag: this seems to be a common OSM style for providing 'subtype' information, but perhaps there's a better way?
So, for example... Regular post offices: amenity=post_office post_office=Post Office branch (or omitted) operator=Post Office (or omitted) Royal mail delivery offices: amenity=post_office post_office=Royal Mail delivery office operator=Royal Mail Parcelforce depots: amenity=post_office post_office=Parcelforce depot operator=Parcelforce -- Cheers, John _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
