[OSM-talk] Prolification of the amenity tag

[Joerg Ostertag (OSM Munich/Germany)]

...

> I can understand some of problems with ="wifi" and I will come onto that
> later, but with regards to the objections to ="clinic" and ="park_ride" I
> am somewhat stumped. I requested ="clinic" because in many parts of the
> world, and is becoming more so in the UK local communities are served not
> by a hospital which already has a tag, but by a clinic, thus it becomes a
> logical extension that the clinc should have a tag. Similarly with
> ="park_ride", parking already has a tag, thus where it exists 'Park and
> Ride' schemes should be identified and and differentiated. Note my employer
> does not reimburse parking fees if a park and ride scheme exists.
>
> When I requested the tag I was thinking as much of street/area based
> setups, such as are appearing in Milton Keynes, Norwich and Brighton as I
> was of individual hotspots in cafes, bars etc, and with the growing use of
> VIOP services as well as computer access, it seemed to follow that just as
> phones are tagged, wifi services should be tagged.
>
> The problem that I have with orginal objection, is that if you follow it to
> its logical conclusion OSM should do nothing other than map/hold data for
> roads, footpaths, cycle paths and railways and everything else should be
> done either with a mashup or by going elsewhere. The problem as I see it
> with this approach is that people will go elsewhere fullstop. My view,
> comes from a point of experience travelling the globe, and is if I have
> needed to find something a feature or amenity then the data should at least
> be in OSM, whether it is rendered as a matter of course and at what zoom
> level is another question. But there is nothing as easy as looking for
> something.
>
> Take pharmacies for example, a proposed tag that also been voted against,
> during a trip upto Scotland this autumn a member of my family fell ill, the
> condition, we thought, was not too serious and could be treated with
> medcines from a pharmacy, miles from home we hit Perth, our first stop was
> an out of town Tesco (their petrol station is on my SatNav), but they had
> no pharmacy. We then asked about 20 people but none of them knew of a local
> pharmacy, they all knew of one or two but they we located in the depths of
> Perth. Not knowing Perth using the phone directory or yellow pages was
> pointless as it would have meant plotting each Pharmacy on the map in order
> to find both where it was and if it was close to our location. In the end
> we came across a paramedic who was able to point us to a doctor's surgery
> (another tag that has been voted against) with an attached pharmacy, just
> two streets away. When we arrived the parmacist refered my relative to the
> doctor and they ended up with precription medicine. This all took a great
> length of time and pain and discomfort on the part of my relative, which
> could have been saved simply by having a map which showed all the
> pharmacies in Perth.

As you probably all know I definitely see these things the same way as you.

-- 
Jörg (Germany, Munich)

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