[Tagging] landuse for government offices ?

[John Willis]

> On Sep 20, 2018, at 9:40 AM, Joseph Eisenberg <joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It’s not necessary to have a separate landuse area if the government office is in a single building or shop. In that case  the overarching “landuse” is still retail or commercial.

Do they sell "legislation" at a town hall? Does the DMV "conduct commerce"? Nope. Retail is always wrong. Commercial is a crutch. 

As for not needing an area polygon, I disagree. People mapping in a detailed way will want a point, a building, and an area. There are areas are available for many landuses, but not civic. 

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/36.31039/139.35191

Here is a convenience store I mapped. It is surrounded by fields, a restaurant, Civic buildings and surge resivoir. 

It is a single building on a single landuse, similar to the restaurant, the police station, fire station, and rice fields.  

Because it is a single use area - it doesn't need an area tag to encompass it's parking lots? Fences? Driveways? I think it does. 

The same is true with any Civic building. 

Even a single shop or a single single city hall building can and (eventually) should be mapped with such details, just as we would map commercial, industrial, and retail buildings. Point - building - area. Maybe the point is merged with the building or the area, but building *and* area are necessary in all but the most urban of environments. 

This is why I proposed land use=Civic, later revised to landuse=civic_admin. 

If a town hall or government office is a single building, you could just map the building and drop a pin on it. 

But if you wanted to map the extent of the land, using commercial or retail (imo) is *never* acceptable. It is not for commerce nor selling goods. We don't use landuse=retail for a hospital or a park for similar reasons. 

I wholeheartedly believe the decision to use commercial for Civic buildings was wrong, and came from an adversity to making enough new landuse values at the start. I want to correct that. 

I would like all landuse=Foo and building=foo to be similar, and be obvious what to use with new mappers. Industrial buildings are mapped on an industrial landuse. Building=Civic is mapped on... Commercial? Ugh. 

Landuse=civic_admin not only allows the proper mapping of stand-alone offices, but is the *only* way to proper way to map Civic complexes of multiple buildings with unique names. 

It is useful for both stand-alone buildings or multi-building complexes: there are always parking lots, walkways, and other amenities that "belong" to the point/building, yet are outside the building's footprint. An area polygon is the only way to map them, and landuse=* is the most versitille and consistent tag key to do it with.

Javbw. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20180920/5bd45acc/attachment-0001.html>