[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - (consulate)-->(office=diplomatic)

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> On 10. Nov 2018, at 06:23, Allan Mustard <allan at mustard.net> wrote:
> 
> I plowed through the comments and have rewritten and moved the
> amenity=consulate proposal to office=diplomatic.  You may find the
> rewritten proposal here:
> 
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/office%3Ddiplomatic


There has been a lot of discussion and it certainly is impossible to satisfy everyone. The current iteration of the proposal in my eyes would seem like a step back, if we look only at the main tag.

Currently we can identify embassies with just one standard tag, and although it is not perfect because consulates are mixed in, which have a different diplomatic status, I would say it “works” for most applications (also because the name and further tags often make it clear what kind of diplomatic representation it is). If you are in need of a visa, a consulate might work just as well.

If we start moving these into a new tag office=diplomatic, with the definition “Diplomatic, consular, or non-diplomatic representation of a foreign country or subnational government in a host country as defined by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, UN Charter, other multilateral agreement on diplomatic missions, or bilateral agreement.”, in other words it now includes also non-diplomatic representations, i.e. has become a broader category, hence less information, at least with basic tagging. You can not usually get a visa from a liaison office, or can you?

Plus the potential confusion with private companies that offer support or consultancy for diplomatic procedures (e.g. visa applications), as were mentioned in this thread before.

Even if I don’t agree with the main choice, I still see good value in the proposal. You have documented a lot of useful subtags, thank you for this! Provided a lot of these properties are added on an object, it wouldn’t really matter what the main tag is, but in reality many mappers just add one tag and a name, so it may take time until we reach at a decent level of dissemination, and in the meantime we’d sometimes not be able to distinguish facilities which offer diplomatic services to citizens from those that don’t.

The subtags work with any main tag, so this part is much appreciated anyway. ;-)


Cheers, Martin