[Talk-us] More things that are no longer there: schools.

[James Umbanhowar]

Check out the historic tag
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Historic).  You could add
historic=school and maybe historic:name="School Name".  

On Fri, 2012-07-13 at 14:40 -0400, Kevin Kenny wrote: 
> As I've mentioned in the past, I have some personal mapping projects
> that use OSM data.
> 
> One at least one of them, I display icons for facilities such as
> schools, hospitals, police and fire stations, and houses of worship.
> I notice that a great many of the schools that appear in the generated
> map are, in fact, not usable as landmarks, because the map is reporting
> places where schoolhouses once stood; in many cases the sites have been
> redeveloped and no trace of the historic school remains, or the site
> has changed hands and the historic schoolhouse is now a private home.
> For many of the old schoolhouses, it certainly isn't obvious from the
> street that they were ever anything but private homes.
> 
> I see that these tend to have (historical) ending their names. Is
> this generally a reliable indicator? Is there another tag I should be
> looking for to tell me "there was once a school here, but there is
> no longer?" I don't see anything obvious, for instance, in the feature
> with OSM ID = 375600685 to distinguish it from an active school.
> 
> If there is no reliable information distinguishing historical schools,
> and if I were to attempt to correct the situation in areas where I have
> personal knowledge, is there any consensus on the correct way to tag
> these objects? I surely don't want to revert someone else's edits
> simply because they contain data that do not interest me, but is there
> any way that I can start being able to filter them?
> 
> I have read http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/USGS_GNIS - but I find
> it uninformative for answering this question. I see the instruction,
> "If you come across a feature that no longer exists in the real world,
> feel free to delete it," but what's the right thing to do with a
> former schoolhouse that still stands as a private house? It exists,
> but it is not in service nor any longer easily identifiable as a school.
> 
> And please, don't flame me. This is simply a question about, "if I
> wish to exclude historical schools from a rendered map, is there a
> way to identify them in order that I can do so?" I advance no position
> about whether they ought or ought not be in OSM.  I recognize that
> they must have been of value to whoever put them there, and respect
> that.
> 
> If my question has no good answer, I'd rather tolerate the clutter
> than mess up the map.
>