This is not technically Israel specific, but I felt it makes sense to create this post here anyway - if people think it should be moved, please let me know.
The current diet:kosher= tag has three values: yes, no and only. This can leave a lot of ambiguity, as diet:kosher=yes might be applied to
- a fully kosher supermarket,
- a regular supermarket with a single kosher aisle,
- a coffee shop with Chalav Yisrael but otherwise no kosher products
- a sit-down meaty restaurant
- many, many more very distinct scenarios
On its own, I don’t see the diet:kosher= tag as particularly useful. Someone looking for a kosher cafe probably also wants to know if it’s Chalav Yisroel. Or someone looking for a restaurant probably wants to know if it’s milky or meaty (or parve - yes, there are sit-down restaurants only serving parve). And they very, very likely want to know the hechsher / certifying agency.
According to taginfo, many of the above scenarios have been marked by various custom tags - eg, diet:kosher:meat=yes, diet:kosher:chalav_yisrael=yes, and diet:kosher:certification=. But these aren’t really standardised in any way. And while diet:kosher:certification is in some level of use, there’s no standard for how to name an agency, and how to handle establishments with multiple certifications.
I’d like to propose some kind of standardisation of:
- Which kashrus data belongs in OSM
- How to tag
I also thought of potentially starting a separate project to store any kashrus data that’s concluded as not belonging in OSM.
This is my first post here, and my first “formal” OSM interaction - I hope this all makes sense!