[Tagging] "Feature Proposal - RFC - (office=courier)"

[John Willis]

Javbw

> On May 15, 2017, at 10:28 PM, Tobias Wrede <list at tobias-wrede.de> wrote:
> 
> What you write makes a lot of sense. Just, that a lot of that exactly applies to post offices/postal services as well. So why should post_office be an amenity and courier a shop? I still suggest to somehow unify post_office and courier,

Because the infrastructure is similar to _many businesses_, but the "customer facing side" of the business - the "post office" - is considered culturally different. 

A dentist is a tooth doctor. 
A McDonalds is a restaurant 
A convenience store is a market. 

But we tag them differently based on cultural separation of different things. This is difficult sometimes (when is a stream a river?) - but we have to be flexible to allow for this. Maybe it _is_ tagged all the same and it is presented differently by the data customer rendering it differently in their maps, but OSM usually represents these differences in the tag data - the lowest level - because OSM's issue is getting people to map the "the ground truth", which requires it to cater to people like me: a noob who is not a data consumer who wants to map. This requires a tagging system (or very good abstracted WYSIWYG editors) for the taggers. This means tagging systems should be noob-compliant as much as possible. Representing cultural differences in the lowest level of tagging is a good place to start. 

~~~~~

I would say a good place to connect courier and the postal services is not at the office level, but at the service level. 

My parents ship packages via a box shop because they don't want to mess up the customs forms, so they have someone else do it. This box shop ships via many services, including the USPS. 

I would say including them in the service when it goes beyond [amenity=mailbox] (however you tag a public mail drop box), such as a place that sells parcel postage and ships it for you:

Name=overpriced box shop
Building=retail
Shop=courier
Courier:service:USPS=yes. 
Courier:service:UPS=yes
Courier:service:FedEx=no 


The post offices - the culturally separate building - is kept separate, and the service is tied into the courier system where it is useful. 

Tagging the back-end of the post system with the same tags (warehouse=courier) is probably fine too, but I wouldn't touch "post office" with a 10 foot pole. 

Javbw.