[Tagging] Proposed feature - age groups in schools

Svavar Kjarrval svavar at kjarrval.is
Sun Nov 25 22:17:47 GMT 2012


Hi.

Like I stated in the proposal, it varies a lot between countries. I
agree that there are different systems determining when children get
into schools and here in Iceland it's defined as a year group. However,
some countries have cut off dates which don't comply with the almanac
year so it's not always Jan 1st to Dec 31st. That could be defined in
another tag to make the information more granular. Without such a tag,
one can at least know that the school educates children who become X old
that year.

Regarding cases where the prefixed parts kind of answer the question,
that's not always the case. Here in Iceland, we're lucky that the
Ministry of Education keeps a list of all elementary schools (they're
175) and on said list there's only a handful of them which have any
indication that they're elementary schools. This will most likely apply
in other countries as well. Also, if such a data processing would cover
the planet, it would be very time-consuming to derive such information
in all the languages by hand, so said person would only want to cover
areas with school names in a language he/she knows and if he/she has
time to research the school system in each area to make such deductions.
With this tag, the work is already done.

Example case:
When my neighbourhood was under construction, the elementary school
there only served students for the first four years (of the mandatory
10) in the year 2005. In the year 2006 it increased to the first 7
years, in 2008 the first 9 years and finally included the 10th year in
2009. Even if the name had an indication that it was an elementary
school, any deductions made from the age/year groups from reading the
name would've been wrong. Also, that same elementary is also a
kindergarten which makes it a bit harder to define from the name alone.
So an age group, in that case, wouldn't have been such a bad idea. If
OSM had progressed in 2005 as it has now, it would've been useful for
many purposes to know that it didn't serve all 10 years of elementary
school teaching.

After this proposal has been voted on, I intend to introduce a proposal
to define school areas. Age groups can play a huge role, especially in
the example case above, where children in certain school years were sent
to a school in another neighbourhood. So the same neighbourhood was in
the area of two schools, each educating children of different school
years. Without this tag in the example case above, well, we'd be boned.

If anybody skips a year or repeats one, that's of course an exception
this tag can't remedy.

I agree about the factoid you mentioned shouldn't be in the wiki page
for the tag, should it be accepted. These were just examples of uses so
you'd get the gist of what the data could be used for. It was not
intended as ultimate or the best examples of use. I'll find a more
general case before requesting a vote on the proposal.

- Svavar

On 25/11/12 21:07, Steve Bennett wrote:
> Hi,
>   With the exception of pre-schools, aren't most schools defined by
> the year group, rather than age? Around a here, a primary school is
> Prep to Grade 6, and high school is Year 7 to Year 12. The actual
> ranges of kids varies a bit - some skip years, some repeat. I can't
> see much use for coding an "age group".
>
> To be honest, I'm not sure I even see the value in coding year groups
> - what does "year_group=7-12" tell you that "Blah Blah High School"
> doesn't? The use case of a parent choosing where to send their kids is
> such a rare one, and involves so much other research that I don't
> think having that factoid in OSM achieves much.
>
> Steve
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 11:08 AM, Svavar Kjarrval <svavar at kjarrval.is
> <mailto:svavar at kjarrval.is>> wrote:
>
>     Hi.
>
>     The RFC process has started for my proposal to tag the age groups
>     schools offer education for. More information is on the wiki page.
>
>     The proposal is at
>     https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/age_group .
>
>     With regards,
>     Svavar Kjarrval
>
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