while mapping courthouses there are limited tags for metadata. for instance, if one would like to add information about the type (ie magistrate court, small claims, kadhis court, e.t.c). How can I go about that?
There does not seem to be an established tagging scheme for that.
A logical extension could be to use courthouse tag to refine amenity=courthouse. Taginfo shows a very limited use (only 16 distinct values over two dozen features), but the scope looks reasonable enough for a start (administrative, coroner, magistracy, regional, criminal, civil). Alternatively, court has more uses, but most are specific to Latvia.
If you’re into the matter, feel free to propose a classification that could possibly work on an international level.
I think the problem that you will find is that cities might have different courthouses or courtrooms for specific types of work, but that in other places, the courthouse only has 1 or 2 courtrooms and they are used for all types of work.
As court systems will typically vary from country to country and even region to region, one has to consider a whole matrix of court types.
Ireland has:
- Supreme Court
- Appeal Court
- High Court
- Circuit Court
- District Court
- Some quasi-judicial authorities that do not come directly under the court system.
Then there are the different types of case:
- Criminal (summary)
- Criminal (serious)
- Criminal (special)
- Children
- Family
- Coroner
- Administrative
- Commercial
- Employment
- Tort
And the above is without considering multi-lateral / international courts.
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On top of all that, in many U.S. states, a county courthouse functions as the seat of county government, housing the county’s executive-legislative council chambers alongside the court chambers. I think we normally tag these facilities as amenity=courthouse, but in principle amenity=townhall would also apply to any seat of local government.
In micromapping, we can split the difference by treating amenity=courthouse and amenity=townhall as misnomers for the county court and county executive headquarters POIs within the same courthouse building. However, in many of these jurisdictions, the county judge serves a dual role as the county executive, so it’s the same chamber anyways.
As if that isn’t fun enough, most of Louisiana’s parishes are led by an executive-legislative council known as the “police jury”. This causes most maps to misidentify the police jury building as a police station. We originally imported them from as GNIS amenity=police. Most of these mistagged “police stations” remain to be retagged as amenity=townhall.
I would think there are about as many systems as countries out there. If you want to aim for something on an international scale, you might want to peak into something similar like our admin boundaries
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