How should we map Scout groups (or anything similar really).
Surprisingly I didn’t find much to go on, I’m hoping some people here can help me make a strong proposal.
What is a scout club?
In my understanding (as a scout and leader for a number of years) there are some general things we can say. Scout groups are independent youth organizations which are members of a national association. Any one country can have many scout groups with focus on different activities (typically air/sea/land) and membership of one of several national organizations. The different national organizations typically exist because of historical disagreements about how scouting should be done.
Club or building?
The guidance I found focuses on buildings. This is not flexible as many Scout groups use a building which they do not own or operate.
Since I see no discussion on the wikipage how to map a I’ve made my suggestion for how to map a scout club directly on that page with a comment linking back to this discussion.
My intention is some guidance that can work on nodes, buildings, polygons or addresses. Whatever works best in each situation.
There’s not so much in that documentation, I want more. But I see on the discussion page a bit more context, and some out of date suggestions re use of the community_center tag.
It’s possible that I’m making an issue of this one mapping type because so much of OSM is new to me, so there’s a lot I’m unsure of and have trouble finding definitive examples to work from.
Firstly, if not already done, map the building the scouts are operating out of. That could be as simple as building=yes but ideally would be more specific. Draw this as an area with the edges matching the outline of the building.
Now map the scouts club. You can do this using a node (point). Just add the node somewhere inside the footprint of the building. Add club=scout plus any other information that seems useful (such as the tags you’ve outlined). If there are tags which you think would useful to describe the scout club that don’t already exist, then you’re free to use any tags you like to describe it. Just be sure to do a thorough search to make sure something doesn’t already exist (it may be named slightly differently).
In cases where the scouts are the only users of the building, you can add the club=scout tags directly to the building (e.g., building=yes + club=scout). Though do check with your local mapping conventions as some areas tend to discourage this approach.
The above steps are pretty common tagging in OSM - especially for clubs and similar.
That’s fine, we’re always happy to help. For examples, it might be worth looking at this query: overpass turbo This shows you all club=scout currently in the OSM database in Europe (it will take a minute or two to run). Maybe have a look in your country to see how others are tagged.
Here’s my next question as I go through setting up danish scout groups…
Many scout groups (not just in Denmark) have rather old, technical or whimsical names. For example “Tydal”, “Århus Gruppe” and “2. Ry” are scout clubs in Denmark. Neither the danish nor english word for scouts is part of the name. So I note that doing a regular nomatum search for “spejder”, the danish word for scout, gives me no scout clubs (instead a chain of outdoors sports stores called ‘Spejdersport’).
I found short_name, alt_name and description as possible fixes where I could write something like the name of the city and the world scout. So instead of simply name=1. Division Thourup I can add description=Hedensted Spejdere
Ideally I would like nominatim to understand that a search for “spejder” in a danish context should give results for club=scout. But that’s just not how it works.
@circinate I can see that you added a description of “Søspejder i Hørsholm” (seascouts in Hørsholm) to Jon Litle Sø but it still doesn’t show up in a nominatim search for søspejder. That search only brings up Kastrup Søspejder where søspejder is in the name. So it doesn’t look like nominatim reads/uses the description.
I see though that while my browser is set to English it is reading name:en and presenting that as the name in results. It will also return results for text in name:en (Spejder Sport in Amager has the name:en of Scouting Equipment).
None of this gets closer to an answer to your question. Just more examples of what doesn’t help. It would seem wrong to expand the name with a more descriptive text just to better get caught by the search… but I’m not sure what the alternative is.
Hier im Faden taucht der MapComplete-Link Scouting groups noch nicht auf.
Da könnte man doch mal nachsehen, wie anderswo Pfadfindergruppen eingetragen wurden…
The link you to MapComplete shows lots of scout groups and camps in denmark. So yes, that’s useful. @circinate has made a short list of different examples on the talk page of club=scout. The main conclusion is that some of the groups names are not very helpful in a search, and that brand is a good tag for writing the scout association.
Nominatim is more focused on searching for named places than for points of interest in a given category, which are often easier to find via other tools such as Overpass Turbo. This is not specific to scout clubs or to any particular approach to tagging.
That said, Nominatim does have “special phrases” that allow for some limited searching for POI categories. You can see from the wiki page and its sub pages that there is quite a long list in English but nothing so far in Danish. Even the long English list doesn’t include scout clubs currently.
I’d use the Danish taginfo instance at Geofabrik for searching. For example, this is a list of all the names used, and you can easily filter by “spejder” to get a useful list. You can then check the tagging on those.
What’s a good way for me to track my progress on tidying up entries for scouting in Denmark?
An obvious solution is to keep a spreadsheet which I can compare to national lists as I go. But I can’t see how to download an csv file from taginfo. It looks like it’s offering one (next to a JSON download) but it seems to just reset the whole search. Is there some other common way to track progress?