[Talk-GB] UK Quarterly Project: Post Offices

[SK53]

Can we please avoid changing the meaning of post office by extending it to
courier offices, and restrict it to those places which offer not only a
full service mail offering (aka Universal Postal Service), but the
traditional other services available at post offices (some banking,
government forms, etc). Extending the meaning of the tag would make OSM
data immediately intrinsically less useful in cities where courier offices
exist. Such a change would a) require every post office to be suitably
tagged with an indication of which service it belongs to; and b) require
every data consumer to change.

At the very least discuss this on the tagging mailing list: such a change
in meaning for a widely used tag needs to be treated with caution and
consensus in more than just the UK.

Jerry



On 3 May 2018 at 10:08, Robert Whittaker (OSM lists) <
robert.whittaker+osm at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2 May 2018 at 19:08, David Woolley <forums at david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:
> > On 02/05/18 18:52, ael wrote:
> >>
> >> I am confused:-)  How should a Royal mail local delivery office be
> >> tagged? It seems that it is not amenity=post_office. I notice that
> >> I have used post_depot once some time ago, but that doesn't seem to be
> >> in the wiki (or in the presets for josm). Yet I am sure that I got it
> >> from somewhere. Not that it seems very natural.
> >
> > I'm fairly sure this came up a couple of months ago and the answer was
> > amenity=post_depot; operator=Royal Mail.  It's not, in principle,
> different
> > from Hermes or TNT.
>
> That's certainly what I'd use. I think there's a good case for tagging
> customer-facing shop-like outlets of courier firms as
> amenity=post_office since they're places from which you can send
> stuff. But for the large warehouse-style sorting/distribution centres
> I think something else is needed. amenity=post_depot seems a good
> choice to me. It has over 400 uses worldwide, of which over 300 are in
> the UK.
>
> The legitimate use of amenity=post_office for non-Post Office Ltd
> branches creates a slight issue for my comparison tool. I've got some
> heuristics to account for some sets of objects based on name,
> operator, and brand tagging. See:
> http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/postoffice/osm-unmatched.html#non-pol
>
> Robert.
>
> --
> Robert Whittaker
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/attachments/20180503/3d5af088/attachment.html>