OpenStreetMap
Today, I searched for a school in OSMAnd+, with a POI search. I was surprised to see so few in the area, so I jumped onto JOSM to investigate.
I saw some schools with building=school tags, while other schools had amenity=school tags. What is going on here? On to the OSM Wiki to learn more.
Ah, ha! The schools are supposed to have a border defined which uses the amenity=school tag, for the perimeter of the school grounds. The amenity tag, not the building tag, should carry the name of the school complex. I assume the building’s name= tag is used to define the name of the building, instead. Clever.
There are some non-obvious ways of doing things in OSM, but the more that I learn, the more other OSM methods become more intuitive. Are there other boundaries that are better defined by the amenity= tag?
Discussion
Comment from Sanderd17 on 14 August 2016 at 15:56
Amenity=* tags should go on what they define. Around here, most schools have multiple buildings, and the playground is clearly part of the school. So the amenity=* tag defines the perimeter and not the building.
The same holds for other big features like industrial sites. If you can accurately define a feature with a single building (like pubs and restaurants in most cases), it’s fine or even preferred to put the tag on the building.
Comment from Warin61 on 14 August 2016 at 22:57
Adding detail? The leisure=pitch could also have a sport=x tag .. where x is the sport played there …. if more than one sport then use, for example, sport=tennis;basketball
The building could have a few floors too. And some ‘school buildings’ are for sport, meeting hall etc. I’d not tag those as building =school as they don’t have class rooms.
Comment from BushmanK on 15 August 2016 at 02:35
Based on my experience of answering tagging-related questions, I’d say, that if you thing that something in OSM is obvious/intuitive without reading tag documentation, you most likely have wrong idea about it. OSM uses natural language for keys and values, and especially if you are native English speaker, you can feel like you got everything from meaning of this word. But concepts of OSM often have a bit different or stricter meaning than words you know. So, it’s better to check documentation first.
Good examples are masts/towers and bridges/tunnels.
Comment from Carnildo on 16 August 2016 at 01:47
The mast/tower problem stems from trying to group three things (roughly: European radio towers, American super-tall antennas, and cell phone antennas) into two categories.