[OSM-talk] Mapping party suggestion for SOTM

[Tim Waters (chippy)]

2009/7/9 Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com>:
> A few months ago in some local news media a talking head claimed that
> Amsterdam's Red Light District wasn't in central Amsterdam and
> moreover that it didn't contain any Coffee shops, i.e. ones of the
> type that'll sell you more than just beverages.
>
> So of course I headed over to OSM to prove both of these to be
> incorrect. Only to find to my disappointment that not only did the map
> of Amsterdam not have an area (or even a POI!) for the Red Light
> district, it also didn't have any sort of tagging schema for
> aforementioned Coffee shops.
>
> (Incidental after some searching around this is the best map I can
> find showing those two features:
> http://www.coffeeshop.freeuk.com/Map.html)
>
> So here's hoping that SOTM visitors to Amsterdam will be able to
> rectify this situation.
>
> The problem of coming up with a tagging schema for POIs applicable to
> these two categories I leave to you.
>

I think that would be an interesting little micro mapping party.

Brings up the subject of how to map known "illegal establishments" -
we should map the truth on the ground, we should map their land use as
something like "brothel" and "recreational drug shop", in my opinion.

In a few countries, the law looks the other way, or are facing
loopholes, - the places name themselves "massage parlour", "coffee
shop" but people passing by know what they are really for. Added to
this is the threat that these places may take offence (sue?) at being
labeled as doing illegal things (even though they may well be).

Tim