[Talk-GB] Q2 2020 Quarterly project GP Surgeries and health sites

[Peter Neale]

Hi Robert,
I also don’t want to delete the objects completely; as they do exist, so we should be able to map them.  
However, I do take your point that a pharmacy which is not open to the public is not an “amenity” in OSM.  So my 2 “wholesale” pharmacies do not meet the wiki definition of “amenity=pharmacy: a shop where a pharmacist sells medications” > “A shop is a place selling retail products or services.”
I think they may both be better tagged as “office=company” (I know that one of them is also the head office of the company and they both function as offices).  I could add a Note explaining why they are not tagged as “amenity-pharmacy”, which might deter other mappers from using this tagging, in response to the flag generated by your excellent tool.
I tried following the link to your proposed new source of “official” data, but none of the 3 links to the data worked very well for me.
Link 1:  (API format) led to http 404 error.Link 2  (CSV(TSV) format – led to http 404 errorLink 3  (XSV format) downloaded a file with a “.csv” file extension that seemed to be tab-separated, rather than comma-separated.  I took that into a text editor and did a global Find and Replace of Tab with Comma.  The resultant .csv file loaded into Excel just fine, but it has over 11,000 lines and many of them must now have additional commas, because a number of fields are right-shifted (Post Code in the Latitude Column, Latitude in the Longitude Column, etc.)  Also, over 700 have Blank in the Address1 Field, with the whole address in Address 2, Address 3, etc.  Then quite a few (from my sample in the first 30) have County values in the ParentName Field.  So I fear that, unless you can do a better conversion than I did (and you almost certainly could, I know!) you will have a lot of manual cleaning up to do, before you can use this data.
The good news is that neither of my “wholesale” pharmacies is in that downloaded file, so, if you were able to use it as a source for your comparison tool, it would no longer flag them as “missing pharmacies”.
Good luck and thanks for the excellent tools, which keep me busy, trying to find missing post boxes, pharmacies and the like.


Regards,Peter 

    On Wednesday, 15 April 2020, 16:46:43 BST, Robert Whittaker (OSM lists) <robert.whittaker+osm at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 at 20:40, Peter Neale <nealepb at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> I looked up my 2 "wholesale" pharmacies on the list.  Unfortunately, they are both classed as "community", so will continue to be included in your checking tool.
>
> So... ...should we:
> a.  Continue as we are: Plot them in OSM, tag them as pharmacies, but give them a name that makes it clear that they are not publicly accessible?
> b.  Delete them from OSM, so that consumers don't think they are publicly accessible.  (But they do exist and who knows what consumers will really want to find?)  Then we could ask you to manually delete them from the checking tool (but you probably won't want to keep doing that).
> c.  Do something else?

I certainly wouldn't advocate any inappropriate tagging just to keep
my tool happy! So if we don't think they should be amenity=pharmacy,
then we shouldn't tag them like that. While they may technically be
pharmacies, I would think that amenity=pharmacy is best reserved for
places that are amenities for the general public to use, which would
rule out option (a). As for (b), I wouldn't necessarily delete the
objects completely from OSM: if there's a business presence on the
ground, that could still be tagged. The question then is whether it's
worth tweaking my tool to remove these false positives. You could just
ignore the "missing pharmacy" markers local to you that you know are
wrong. As you say, I would have a manually maintained "ignore" list,
but that would be more effort for me.

What I'd prefer to to is to switch to a better data source for my
pharmacy list. There is a list of NHS-contracted pharmacies at
https://data.gov.uk/dataset/e373eb6a-fffd-48e5-b306-71eb17f97af2/pharmacies
which I think would closer match what we want for amenity=pharmacy,
but unfortunately that list appears to be England only. So I'd need to
find corresponding lists for Wales and Scotland. (NI isn't in the data
I'm currently using. I've found
https://www.psni.org.uk/registration/premises-registration/changes-to-the-premises-register/
but the data is all locked up in PDFs.) Can anyone help out here?

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker

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