[Tagging] emergency=*

[Steve Bennett]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 3:19 PM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com> wrote:
> In Australia the ambulance service is a completely different
> organisation to fire and police and I can almost bet some would be
> tagged amenity=ambulance or amenity=ambulance_station... That isn't to
> say we should keep doing this if nothing else has been documented or
> used extensively...

Coming up with tagging schemes for stuff like this hard, because of
the different ways different countries group stuff. I was recently in
an ambulance in France, and chatting with the people inside I was
surprised to learn that in addition to being ambulance officers they
also acted as firemen: they were "sapeurs-pompiers", and were employed
by the local council. They contrasted themselves with "ambulanciers"
who are employed by a hospital.

The right long term solution for this stuff is to use country-specific
tags, (eg, in australia we could use amenity=ses_station or
something), and to centrally define (in machine-readable terms) what
those country-specific tags are. But I think we're a fair way from
being able to implement anything like that at present.

Steve