The small text says “This postal outlet is operated by its owner under license from Canada Post Corporation”. However the brand is prominently that of Canada Post’s.
I’ve also seen another sign like this at an outlet located in a pharmacy, I haven’t taken a picture of it yet, but I probably could if someone has questions.
I am thinking that this should be changed and the tags added should be brand and brand:wikidata, but not operator or operator:wikidata. I can make a pull request for Name Suggestion Index if others agree.
But I don’t fully know the organizational details around Canada Post. How many of “Canada Post” outlets are actually operated by Canada Post - is it most, or a minority? Is it maybe that Postal Stations are operated by Canada Post, but most outlets are not?
I do suspect operator is often wrong in general due to misunderstanding of how it’s supposed to work with franchises. For several years my local No Frills was tagged with operator=Loblaw Companies Limited, my local Shoppers Drug Mart still is…
I agree that “Canada Post” is the brand but not necessarily the operator. Here in Vancouver, many (most?) Canada Post locations are operated by the store they are located inside of and not Canada Post.
In BC, the majority of Canada Post locations incorrectly use the branch name for the amenity name. Is NSI able to suggest the name to to be replaced with “Canada Post” and the existing name to be moved to the branch tag?
Do you know of a use case for including brand:en and brand:fr cases countrywide?
If I only speak English and go to Gaspé, I don’t really see the value in knowing that the English brand of the post office named Postes Canada with the red flying envelope logo is “Canada Post” - maybe I’m missing something?
My understanding is that the more useful tag is actually brand:wikidata, which lets data users link the feature to Canada Post - Wikidata which has the French and English names and identifies it as the Canada Post (as opposed to some knockoff I guess) and lets them find the logo[1] or any other properties. Then the brand tag is a human-readable fallback.
Personal opinion follows: I’m not really a fan of putting in a million brand and operator tags on this. It gets absurd with things like Node: Electric Circuit (11673294312) | OpenStreetMap which has name, name:en, name:fr, brand, brand:en, brand:fr, brand:wikidata, brand:wikipedia, operator, operator:en, operator:fr, operator:wikidata, operator:wikipedia - 13 tags to say that it’s a Circuit électrique charger that’s operated by Circuit électrique. At least they didn’t tag owner too?! Wikidata is where names and logos and Wikipedia links should be, IMO.
But I don’t feel super strongly about this and can add it to the PR if others wish.
iD does this, for example, when you have “show third party icons” turned on in its settings - going via Wikidata to social media profiles (e.g. Facebook) and pulling in a logo from there ↩︎
In WikiProject Canada Post, I suggested to use the name of the branch in the “name” tag. This is so each location can be individually distinguished on a search results screen. Each Canada Post office has a name that is listed in the spreadsheets linked to on the Canada Post page in the OSM wiki. And only Canada Post outlets should have the “amenity=post_office” tag in Canada.
@DENelson83, thanks for mapping all these Canada Post locations and including the branch name - I just think we can refine this further. The wiki says
name=* should hold what can be physically observed on signs at the individual branch.
which I think is always “Canada Post” (or “Postes Canada”).
I agree the branch name is important - this is something I have recently been adding to various businesses in the Vancouver area. If we want the branch name to show up in search results, this should probably be implemented in the software we use. See Show branch in search results · Issue #6947 · osmandapp/OsmAnd · GitHub for example.
Anyways, I am probably distracting from the main thread too much. I just thought there may be an opportunity to refine the Canada Post NSI data altogether in a cohesive way.
name=* should hold what can be physically observed on signs at the individual branch.
But that would mean if you search for a post office in Canada on, say, a Garmin device, which only uses the “name” tag in OSM data, all you would see is “Canada Post” repeated down the results page, and you would not be able to tell which one is which. Canada Post does give distinct names to each of its postal outlets, which are accessible in Canada Post’s Android app. I would rather use those names in the “name” tag instead, unless the maintainers of planet.osm ports for Garmin devices can be persuaded to use the “branch” tag for that purpose instead.
Should these Canada Post locations that are not operated by Canada Post be mapped as post_office=post_partner? Personally I do not think tagging is appropriate, since the statement from the wiki, “These postal partners often do not offer the full range of services”, does not apply.
User Blue Clip has been mapping these locations across Canada with the above tagging. I have asked them to join our discussion.
Personally my image of a stereotypical post_partner is that of a convenience store that accepts letters and packages for sending, and holds packages for pickup, maybe they sell stamps as well. (It would have been good if the post_partner wiki page had a few pictures to illustrate… I see a picture only on the German page and it’s of a U.S. postal outlet so who knows how this tag is used in Germany.)
The Canada Post outlets I’m thinking of, stereotypically in pharmacies, are full-size service desks with prominent full-height Canada Post branding so personally I think it’s not wrong to tag them post_office.
On the other hand, on Commons I saw File:Delaware Post Office interior.jpg - Wikimedia Commons from 2008 from Delaware, Ontario where I think post_partner wouldn’t be wrong since it looks like a counter in a convenience store, with one Canada Post brand sign and a Canada Post price list.
This reminds me - it would be good to get a picture or two of the in-store post offices, so the concept can be illustrated for discussion. On Wikimedia Commons I’m finding mostly those in dedicated buildings so far.
