[Tagging] Childcare Tag

[Pieren]

On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 3:07 PM, alyssa wright <alyssapwright at gmail.com> wrote:

> It is my understanding that kindergarten means something very different in other places of the world. How does OSM account for such cultural differences?

Ant the wiki about "nursery" is redirecting to "amenity=kindergarten" ([1])...

We have 3 challenges in this attempt to clarify the "kindergarten" tag :
- cultural : the same words mean different things in different
countries. Also the organizations, their legal status, age limits can
be very different. The wikipedia article about "preschool education"
is an indicator about this disparity.
- combination : mixing different types of child care at the same
location. Thus, we use either a new primary tag and subtags (e.g. your
proposal) or create many primary tags applying on different OSM
elements (e.g. "amenity=nursery" on separate nodes)
- deprecate or redefine an old and well established tag in OSM (kindergarten).

These three challenges made the vote of the first "child care"
proposal rejected. That's why I'm laughing when I read that the vote
proposal was rejected by a "gender gap in the OSM community" ([2]).

I see mainly 2 options here:
- go ahead with a new primary key "amenity=childcare" with subkeys.
But this will imply to "deprecate" the "amenity=kindergarten" in long
term. You have to know that this is very hard in OSM but not
impossible, especially if you have good and valid arguments for the
change. This will require a good wiki documentation, a large consensus
and time. See the "power=station" long story as an example ([6]).
- keep the "amenity=kindergarten" and create new "amenity" tags for
your needs. It has also advantages : only one key, folllows the "duck
tagging" principle ([4]). But you will not be able to combine the
features on a single OSM element (enforcing people to create special
nodes or polygons for tagging).

About the differences between coutries, you might see how it was
solved for international equivalences for "highways" ([3]) or "speed
limits" ([5]) and create a similar page on the wiki (and filled by
local contributors).

My 2 cents,
Pieren

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nursery
[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/childcare#Post-mortem
[3] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway:International_equivalence
[4]  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Duck_tagging
[5] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_tags_for_routing/Maxspeed
[6] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:power%3Dstation