Proposal:Education tag

Key:education
Proposal status:	Voting (under way)
Proposed by:	quincylvania
Tagging:	education=* Data item
Applies to:
Definition:	An educational facility.
Statistics:
Draft started:	2024-08-20
RFC start:	2024-11-11
Vote start:	2025-02-13 00:00:00 (UTC)
Vote end:	2025-02-26 23:59:59 (UTC)

Proposal

education=* shall be adopted as the recommended key for tagging all education features. Following the model of the healthcare=* key, existing education tags such as amenity=school shall not be deprecated and should remain in use alongside education=* tags for the foreseeable future.

Rationale

education=* tag, with over 5,000 uses as of 2024, is an alternate method of tagging schools, universities, and other educational facilities. However, amenity=* tags are by far the standard way to tag these features (amenity=school, amenity=university, etc.). As a result, educational features in OSM share no common tags with each other that identify them categorically. This makes it overly difficult to query, filter, and render educational features. This issue is compounded when trying to account for the long tail of low-usage education tags, like amenity=sailing_school and amenity=cooking_school.

This same situation previously existed for healthcare features until OSM mappers and tools adopted the healthcare=* tag to better categorize them. healthcare=* tags typically live alongside their corresponding amenity=* tags, allowing for a years-long period of transition where existing tools remain functional while the tag is gradually adopted. This method has proven successful, with over 800,000 healthcare=* uses as of 2024.

In the long term, adopting a single education=* key will encourage more accurate and detailed mapping of education features. Mappers who are unsure about the nature of an educational facility can use a tag like education=yes instead of erroneously using amenity=school. Mappers can easily invent new values under education=* for niche feature types. In these cases, data consumers would not have to handle each case individually, since all these features would share the same key, education=*.

Tagging

• Existing education tags (mostly under amenity=*) should be left in place.
• Mappers should add an appropriate education=* tag to educational facilities.
• The education=* value should match the amenity=* value when they are used together.
  • E.g. amenity=college should have education=college, so amenity=college + education=music_school would be a mistake.
• An education=* matching an amenity=* values takes on the exact same meaning.
  • E.g. education=school has exactly the same meaning as amenity=school.
• education=yes may be used to tag an education facility of unknown properties, or to specify that a feature of a different type provides some sort of educational program.
  • E.g. a bar that offers public bartending classes may be tagged amenity=bar + education=yes (though a more specific tag may be developed later).
• Mappers are free to define new values under education=* to describe an educational facility when existing values are inadequate.
• education=yes or custom education=* values should not be used on generic infrastructure.
  • E.g. tagging education=yes on a school parking lot or education=playground on a school playground is discouraged.

Tag mappings

Existing tags with fewer than 100 uses are ignored.

Current tag (remains in use)	New tag (additive)
amenity=kindergarten	education=kindergarten
amenity=school	education=school
amenity=college	education=college
amenity=university	education=university
amenity=trade_school	education=trade_school
amenity=prep_school	education=prep_school
amenity=training	education=training
amenity=driving_school	education=driving_school
amenity=music_school	education=music_school
amenity=language_school	education=language_school
amenity=dancing_school	education=dancing_school
amenity=ski_school	education=ski_school
amenity=surf_school	education=surf_school
amenity=sailing_school	education=sailing_school
amenity=flight_school	education=flight_school
amenity=cooking_school	education=cooking_school
amenity=art_school	education=art_school

Unaffected tags

Tag	Note
amenity=childcare	Childcare without an educational curriculum is considered outside the scope of this proposal.
amenity=dojo	There is some debate over this tag and whether it maps directly to a martial arts training school, or is simply a place where one can practice martial arts.
office=tutoring	This is a low-usage tag with a meaning that is not entirely clear.

Comparison with past proposals

• Proposal:Education Reform (2013, abandoned) proposed tagging educational amenities as amenity=educational_facility + educational_facility=*.
  • This would have been extremely disruptive, deprecating all existing educational amenity=* values.
  • The education=* tag was suggested as an alternative.
• Proposal:Education 2.0 (2016, rejected) was a complex, top-down proposal for education=* plus a number of large number of new tags.
  • Some reviewers opposed the 2016 proposal as too sprawling or unrefined. In comparison, I've tried to keep my proposal targeted and simple.
  • Others worried about having both education=* and amenity=* tags for the same thing. However, this was before the proliferation of the healthcare=* tag provided a viable model.
• Proposal:Education Reform Alternative (2017, abandoned) proposed tagging educational amenities with education=* and education_for=*.
  • This proposal was much more prescriptive than is my proposal.
• Proposal:Training (2022, rejected) proposed replacing specialty tags like amenity=sailing_school with amenity=training + training=*.
  • Some reviewers raised issue with the large number of tag deprecations. In contrast, my proposal does not deprecate any tags.
  • Some reviewers thought the target features were too dissimilar to all share the same primarily tag amenity=training. My proposal instead maps all these tag values directly under education=* without any change in meaning.
  • At least one reviewer suggested using education=* instead.

Features/Pages affected

There are a lot of education-related wiki pages in various languages that will need updating. On feature pages, existing documentation would be left alone while a note recommending concurrent tagging with education=* would be added.

External discussions

• Request for comments on the forum

Comments

Please comment on the discussion page.

Voting

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• I approve this proposal. --Quincylvania (talk) 14:38, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I approve this proposal. --GA Kevin (talk) 14:46, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I approve this proposal. --darkonus (talk) 14:55, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I approve this proposal. Seems like a reasonable step toward more cohesive tagging, while also being a non-breaking change for existing data users. --Willkmis (talk) 15:18, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I approve this proposal. Better than the overuse of the amenity tag. Glassman (talk) 15:43, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I have comments but abstain from voting on this proposal. I do not see "overuse of the amenity tag" as being a thing or a problem. I am also dubious whether duplication of keys as is happening with healthcare=* is worth replicating Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 16:14, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I have comments but abstain from voting on this proposal. I don't think we should add one entry per type of sport, but rather a general education=sport and then add sport=*. This would also be a nice replacement for martial arts schools that are not necessarily a dojo. --Nadjita (talk) 16:26, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I approve this proposal. —seav (talk) 17:43, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I approve this proposal. I think this is a good initial step towards better tagging of education facilities. I was also in favor of earlier versions of this proposal that proposed to group training and sport schools under education=training and using training=* and sport=* tags to further refine the type of training offered, and I hope to see that reintroduced in a later proposal. — Jake Low (talk) 19:01, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I approve this proposal. --ViriatoLusitano (talk | contribs) 19:04, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I approve this proposal. --WalkerB (talk) 20:52, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I approve this proposal. --G.molinario (talk) 22:54, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I approve this proposal. --Nw520 (talk) 23:11, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
• I approve this proposal. --Fizzie41 (talk) 23:18, 13 February 2025 (UTC)