Proposal:Civil

From OpenStreetMap Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Civil
Proposal status: Abandoned (inactive)
Tagging: landuse=official
Statistics:

there has been no work on this for 6 months +. please add finalise the proposal and open it for voting, or it will be deleted on 2008-01-18

Description

Land owned and used by the state, for official and governmental buildings, like town halls, police stations, libraries, public schools. To be used like "residential", "commercial" and "industrial", where no better alternative exists.

I am not a native speaker, maybe another term like "governmental" or "public" is more appropriate. Comments are welcome.

Examples

  • A police station is currently a node feature. The associated building and area may be tagged as landuse=official.
  • A public school is defined as node/area amenity feature. Here, we may additionally tag landuse=official for renderers which render landuse, but not amenities.
  • A different public building (or its associated area respectively), maybe an embassy or a public transport office, could receive the tag landuse=official.

Opinions

I think 'governmental' or perhaps 'civil' would be better than 'official', which is ambiguous (this is the 'official' OSM wiki, for example). I also wonder if landuse is the correct tag, don't you want more building types and a way to denote ownership? Landuse is usually used to denote large zones whilst I can only think of a couple of places with lots of government buildings, and even then it's not exclusively governmental. For example, most British Government offices and the Parliament are in Millbank and Westminster in London, but there are also lots of pubs, cafes, a cathedral, shops, commercial offices and homes in the area. I would have thought it would be more appropriate to draw the particular government buildings in and tag them appropriately. The same goes for libraries, schools, police stations, etc. If it's not clear that they're state owned then tag the buildings as such. Other significant land areas owned by the state are probably then going to be used for particular uses such as agriculture, energy generation, housing, etc. TomChance 09:54, 28 May 2007 (BST)

You're right that official is not a good term.
In Berlin, we do have a lot of areas which are used exclusively or predominantly for government buildings, such as the whole government district. I think that the buildings themselves are well-covered by the tag amenity=public_building (by the way, would you say that a government building which is not meant for public access - but still owned by 'the people' - such as a federal office is a public_building?). My idea was to have a landuse tag to go along with the other areas (residential, commercial, etc.). In the mentioned case, you may not want to draw every single building, or include the surrounding parcel for a vast complex. -- Relet 11:52, 29 May 2007 (BST)
Well that seems fair enough, I do recall a very large administrative district when I was in Berlin last summer. The public_building value should also probably be disambiguated, I think it really refers to community halls and the like. For government buildings it would be better to have something like building=government, which also relates by the way to Proposed_features/Civic_centre TomChance 20:33, 29 May 2007 (BST)

If this refers exclusively to city-owned buildings I'd prefer "municipal" -- but civil is fine otherwise. --Hawke 23:09, 11 June 2007 (BST)

there has been no work on this for 6 months +. please add finalise the proposal and open it for voting, or it will be deleted on 2008-01-18