[Talk-GB] UK Quarterly Project: Post Offices

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On 3 May 2018 at 11:25, SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I agree that this would make sense for the UK, but I'm worried it
might be seen as re-defining the amenity=post_office tag as it's used
internationally. The wiki page at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dpost_office
currently defines it as "A post office. A place where letters and
parcels may be sent or collected." Arguably public offices of courier
companies fit this definition. In the UK though "Post Office" has a
specific meaning, and it would certainly make life easier for the UK
to tag these courier firms differently.

There are a handful of instances of each of amenity=courier,
shop=courier and office=courier, without any one having a significant
majority: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=courier#values .
Does anyone else have any ideas or preferences for possible taggings
for non-Post-Office-Ltd courier firms, if we were to go down that
route?

Or do people think we should use amenity=post_office for them with
some other tagging used to differentiate things? If we did want to use
other tagging to differentiate, then operator=* wouldn't work, as most
Post Office branches are run by third parties. network=* or brand=*
could do, but it would be complicated to use either on objects which
are tagged with both amenity=post_office and e.g. shop=convenience,
since we wouldn't know which part the tags were referring to.

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker