Bot edit proposal: remove amenity=office where it duplicates existing office= tagging

General talk
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I propose to remove amenity=office where it duplicates existing office= tagging

wiki page: here

why it makes sense?

It makes data less confusing, especially if office= is later edited again

amenity=office office=company is duplicative and mildly confusing, if you get amenity=office shop=convenience you need to start looking at data what is going on

so it is better to clean it while it is merely duplication

also, it makes easier to manually investigate remaining amenity=office

And that was how this proposal was triggered - after several cases where human brain was not really needed I looked into it and scale is large enough to make mass edit worthwhile.

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Why is that? Isn’t such kind of tagging “common”. Like natural=water water=* or highway=footway footway=*?

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the difference is that water= is adding detail to natural=water that is in this tagging scheme needed as it a main tag

while amenity=office is used only on tiny part of office= and is not needed, so in rare cases where it appears it is a bit confusing

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Got it, as office is a main tag on its own, we don’t need amenity=office. Sounds reasonable.

Are you going to clean up also disused:amenity=office and amenity=Office (see Taginfo)?

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maybe at some point, but not as a part of this bot edit

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Link broken: " There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, or search the related logs, but you do not have permission to create this page."

Please explain here exactly what tags you propose to replace with what, what is the benefit, and whether any of the tags that you are proposing to change have documented consumers at taginfo.

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link should be fixed now, thanks! (trailing * was handled specially by forum software and generated link was missing it)

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only as "Synonym for office=nonspecific "

As far as I can see it is already described in initial post (and also on the wiki page)

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new wiki link for people in mailing list mode:

wiki page: here

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The main issue would seem to be that the key is currently (as in this year) being added in, relatively speaking, quite high numbers. A “cleanup” edit would seem to only make sense if the source of the tagging is determined and potentially convinced of the errors of its ways.

1 Like
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No, I do not see “tag X will be replaced with tag Y”; I only see " where it duplicates existing office= tagging". Does that mean where office=office? office=company? Something else? It might be obvious to you, but I’ve been “surprised” by your mechanical edits in the past, hence the call for clarity.

I actually think that you are completely missing the point here. The problem is not that “there is some dodgy data that has been added to OSM in the past”, but "people for some reason add amenity=office as a new feature. Looking at overpass, it seems to be localised to a few mappers (often new), adding amenity=office to e.g. buildings. Perhaps ask them why they did it?

Looking at the combination I suspect that some areas have actually had this tidy-up done previously - hopefully also involving advice to new mappers doing it.

Perhaps think of the problem as not “a potential bot edit” but “an opportunity to help new mappers map things properly”.

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I was attempting to do exactly this when going through existing amenity=office and spotted that large chunk of them is just duplication of office= where bothering mappers seems to not be a good use of time - just editing objects to drop amenity=office is better.

Then it turned out that there is sufficiently many of such objects to run it as a bot edit.

Because it will not be replaced, it will be removed where it already duplicates office= tagging (and not edited otherwise)

Where office= has one of expected values. Current list is listed below, but it may be changed in future. Cases where office has no valid value, say amenity=office office=gibberish262663636 will not be edited at all.

accountant, advertising_agency, architect, association, chamber, charity, company, construction_company, consulting, courier, coworking, diplomatic, educational_institution, employment_agency, energy_supplier, engineer, estate_agent, financial, financial_advisor, forestry, foundation, geodesist, government, graphic_design, guide, harbour_master, insurance, it, lawyer, logistics, moving_company, newspaper, ngo, notary, politician, political_party, property_management, publisher, quango, religion, research, security, surveyor, tax_advisor, telecommunication, therapist, travel_agent, tutoring, union, university, visa, water_utility, healthcare, yes

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I have no such strict preferences about order of actions to take, partially because such cleanups reduce risks of people doing it and make more obvious when they happen - but I just located and commented about two recent clusters.

overpass turbo - Changeset: 175231417 | OpenStreetMap

overpass turbo - Changeset: 175967969 | OpenStreetMap

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I would think it would make sense to clean those as well, at least the few amenity=Office.

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yes, but it cannot happen as part of this bot edit as such expansion would invalidate already performed review (and I have not investigated those manually at all, unlike amenity=office)

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I removed a couple of those yesterday after a conversation with the original mapper that confirmed that office=ngo was the way to go for those particular examples. The correct tag was never really in doubt but a conversation allows “… amenity=Office isn’t the usual way to tag these” to be mentioned too.

2 Likes
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@trial @SomeoneElse

Have answers given so far solved your doubts? Or are there still problems that you see here?

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I still prefer to keep the generic amenity=office, on top of office=* , not a big deal, and if you still want to promote office to a top level attribute, then amenity=office without office=* should be replaced by office=yes.

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What answers? Simon said:

I said:

You haven’t addressed those at all, I think?

If the roof is leaking and you wipe the water off the floor, you haven’t fixed the problem, you’ve only removed the current evidence of the problem.

Almost every amenity=office that I look at in the UK is an opportunity to “just map things better”, whether that is just map some buildings or replace with a more appropriate tag that can be determined from the name.

You’re absolutely right that many of the amenity=office; office=* examples are “obviously” already tagged correctly as office=something. Going through these are removing the amenity tagging does make sense, but doing it as a bot edit will (a) miss the edge cases and (b) remove any current evidence as to why these are being added in the first place.

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The solution for that is warnings in editors, or for mappers whose minority editors don’t flag it messages such as changeset comments.