[Tagging] Public buildings

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> Am 09.01.2016 um 22:22 schrieb Matthijs Melissen <info at matthijsmelissen.nl>:
> 
> What do you think? Which way would you prefer to go?


I'd recommend to use more specific tags and discourage usage. I suspect this tag is basically coming from the early days, someone looking at a map where public buildings were highlighted in some way (eg coloured red) and so to be able to do the same, the tag was introduced.

The information is very rough and not fitting well into the tagging system (there's a lot of overlap with more specific tags, e.g. amenity=police/courthouse/prison/townhall/fire_station/...). There is no 1:1 relationship between the rendered map and the tags, we don't need to tag amenity=public_building to be able to highlight them in the rendering if we wish so.

On the other hand, we are still lacking a comprehensive system for government offices and agencies, office=administrative is quite generic as well (you could also say inherently redundant, any office is about administration, isn't it?), and doesn't bear the public aspect that public building expresses.

cheers,
Martin