Hi ! While working on
support for pilgrimage routes (Gudbrandsdalsleden, St. Olavsleden,
Kystpilegrimsleden, Tunsbergleden, and others), I’ve found a specific
data issue in OSM that you folks might be interested in looking into, or
perhaps you know someone in the broader tagging community who is working on it.
The problem: pilgrim centers—the places where you get your
pilgrim passport (Pilegrimspass/credencial) stamped—currently lack consistent
tagging. I’ve checked well-known centers such as the Oslo Pilgrim Center,
Granavollen, Hamar, Dale-Gudbrand, Dovrefjell, Stiklestad, Avaldsnes,
Bergen, and Smøla (regional centers), and found a mix of:
- tourism=information + information=office (without any
pilgrim-specific sub-tags)
- simply building=office
- simply guideposts
- (internationally, e.g., the Camino) office=company
Without a stable, unambiguous tag, it is not possible to build a reliable
searchable category for this—a name-based search would mostly
return guideposts, and including all `information=office` entries would
bring up general tourist offices.
Proposed tagging convention I would like to see considered:
1. For the pilgrimage center/stamp office itself: tourism=information +
information=office, plus a new or more consistently used sub-tag,
such as network=pilgrim or pilgrimage=stamp_office, as well as
operator=. This makes it possible to
filter precisely without including regular tourist offices.
- For pilgrim-related accommodations (hostels, youth hostels associated
with a route): a corresponding network=<route_name> tag on
tourism=hostel/guest_house nodes, in the same way that DNT cabins
are already tagged with network affiliation in Norway. This makes
pilgrim accommodations distinguishable from ordinary accommodations without
relying on the name text.
This is not a problem unique to Norway—the same shortcoming is found on
the Camino and likely on the Via Francigena—so it may also be worth
raising this issue more broadly within the international tagging community,
I hope that a suitable rules of tagging are implemented ASAP, so this can be used by navigation apps.