[Tagging] insurance health

[Greg Troxel]

Agustin Rissoli <aguztinqui at gmail.com> writes:

> In Argentina we want to correctly tagging offices of companies dedicated to
> what we call prepaid medicine, by paying a monthly fee you access a series
> of medical benefits.
> We are hesitating between these tags:
>
> office=health_insurance
> It has no wiki, it has 185 uses, the majority in Belgium since it was
> created in 2013, they even have a preset in JOSM.
>
> office=insurance + insurance=health
> It has a wiki, curiously created by a Belgian user in 2018, it has 66 uses.
> It is the only documented insurance=* key.

While I see Joseph's point about what is normal, I think that's an
artifact of some, perhaps many societies.

I think if this is an office selling insurance of any kind, it should
have office=insurance and then a subtag.  I don't think it helps map
data users to make a second top-level tag.  Basically I think tags
should follow semantics as much as possible, when that's reasonable.

For what it's worth, around me, also in the US, my impression is that
most "insurance offices" are really "property and casualty insurance
offices".  This is for your car, and your house.  But typically not life
insurance so much, and not health.  (I am not sure about professional
liability and business interruption insurance.)

As always, we should step back and ask "when we add these tags, who will
use them, and why".  I see two points:

  some kind of overall statistics of types of businesses

  wanting to find a particular thing

In the case of office=insurance insurance=health, if that's what you
want, you can find it by searching for that just as well as searching
for office=health_insurance.

But if you  want to  ask "how many insurance offices are there and what
is the breakdown by type", it's much more natural to search one key and
switch on subtag, then to consult some information -- which we don't
really have a way to maintain -- that says office=insurance,
office=health_insurance and office=foo_insurance are all types of
insurance offices.