Key:phone

+/- phone Description A telephone number associated with the object. Group Annotation Element help Used combinations in World Australia/Oceania Europe (list) Asia (list) Central America (list) South America (list) Africa (list)

A telephone number associated with a POI.

Summary

Sometimes it is useful to associate a phone number with an object, especially for business, leisure or amenities. A shop, a museum or a pub for example. The object can be on a node or a area. Clearly phone is always an additional descriptive tag to be added alongside other more important tags which denote what the object actually is.

phone=* is widely used and accepted by many mappers but verify that you are not violating data privacy laws in your country (especially for private phone numbers).

Usage

• phone=number where the number should be in international (ITU-T E.164) format
  • phone=+<country code> <area code> <local number>, following the ITU-T E.123 and the DIN 5008 pattern
  • (phone=+<country code>-<area code>-<local number>, following the RFC 3966/NANP pattern)

If your country does not use area codes, that part should be left out.

fax=number may be used in the same way.

How to map

Just add the phone=number tag to any map object that has a phone, following the format described above.

Examples

The illustration shown in the top-right is shop in the UK (code 44), in London (area 20), so could be tagged with phone=+44 20 84527891.

Phone numbers of telephone boxes

Even phone boxes have telephone numbers. Don't be confused. Telephone boxes must always be tagged with amenity=telephone to describe what the object is. You can add the phone=* tag to supply the extra detail of its telephone number (depending on how diligent you feel like being).

phone=+49 4721 28695 for a public phone box on the German island Neuwerk.

Parsing phone numbers

Clearly it will be dangerous to assume that mappers have followed the above format correctly. Code using this tag might defensively reject or attempt to correct possible formatting errors. Specific things to note:

• When dialling the '-'-signs have to be omitted
• If the '+'-sign is not supported, it has to be replaced by the local international call prefix; e.g., 00. The dialling device has to be configured accordingly.

Applications / Web services that display or dial the number from OSM

• Offmaps (iPhone): Displays and dials the phone number in the app's downloadable City Guides.

See also

• OpenLinkMap - A slippy map, making this tag's data available as clickable POIs
• Proposed features/Phone - A proposal for this tag, which has been rejected
• wikipedia:List of country calling codes
• wikipedia:Prefix code