[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Government offices

[Andy Townsend]

On 27/01/2016 13:26, Matthijs Melissen wrote:
> This didn't get any responses yet on the list. II would be interested
> to hear what other mappers think of this proposal!
>
> -- Matthijs
>
> On 26 January 2016 at 00:13, Matthijs Melissen <info at matthijsmelissen.nl> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I have created a proposal to use the tag office=government for the
>> tagging of government offices. The proposal also replaces/discourages
>> a number of tags, amongst which is amenity=public_building.
>>
>> The proposal can be found here:
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Government_offices
>>
>> Please let me know what you think.
>>

I'm not convinced that a wiki page that perpetuates the myth that OSM 
deprecates tags (except in very unusual cases such as highway=byway and 
highway=ford on ways, where the nature of the feature is obscured by 
what should be an attribute) is a good idea. "Discouraging the use of" 
amenity=public_building makes sense though, for the reasons already 
discussed - I couldn't make much sense of its usage when I looked at it 
in the UK.

I have no idea why you have included:

amenity=register_office (1044 instances)
office=administrative (8807 instances)
office=register (137 instances)
office=tax (354 instances)

on that page, without any suggested detailed tagging.  Information will 
be lost if people change e.g. "register offices" to be merely 
"government office".

As an aside, when I looked at "office" use in the UK a month or so ago 
while trying to work out what to render as what, I came up with this list:

https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/SomeoneElse-style/blob/master/style.lua#L1421

Obviously that's a much wider net than you're looking at here, but there 
are some synonyms in there you might want to think about.

Cheers,

Andy