I noticed the wiki page for lawyers Tag:office=lawyer - OpenStreetMap Wiki has been changed quite drastically in June this year, when it comes to refining what a particular lawyer is specialised in.
As the change seems to be driven by one particular user who does not like “;” - separated values I would like to open a discussion about how useful this change is.
Personally I do favour using a scheme analog to the healthcare:speciality=* scheme and not use different approaches for different kinds of POIs. As office=lawyer has a steady increase in usage and has passed >34000 uses, establishing a consensus might be sensible.
Personally I do favour using a scheme analog to the healthcare:speciality=* scheme and not use different approaches for different kinds of POIs.
I believe healthcare specialty is not necessarily comparable to lawyer specialization because the former tend to be specialized in one area while the latter often engage in more than one field.
I don’t think Taginfo values are the best way to show a significance in this case, or do I get it wrong? Just swap =general;paediatrics to =paediatrics;general and you get a new value. To determine the total usage of multi-values one would have to sum up all usages with more than one value.
Usage aside, the question of how to do the tagging is independent from that.
I do not see a lot of discussion in this. The main discussion going on in the references you added is about a missing “i” in your initial changes and forgotten leftovers in other language pages.
Concerning the question of how we actually design the key(s) of a lawyers’ speciality, namely either go with lawyer:speciality=* and multi-values OR have a separate key for each speciality has not really been discussed on a wider base, except for you expressing your antipathy for multi-values. That is the reason why I am bringing this up.
In addition this might have significance in the future for other professions specialising in whatever speciality. Therefore a general principle should be agreed upon.
Concerning the question of how we actually design the key(s) of a lawyers’ speciality, namely either go with lawyer:speciality=* and multi-values OR have a separate key for each speciality has not really been discussed on a wider base, except for you expressing your antipathy for multi-values. That is the reason why I am bringing this up.
I know that reference and I know both pros and cons, but the actual practice seems to be to accept it for certain usages. It would be interesting to find out which use cases are prominent in that respect.
Is it consensus only because it is documented? There are so many approved multi-value tags nowadays and apps like Osmand have no problems evaluating them. I think this wiki page is outdated.
The discussion that Fabi2 points to consists of a few exchanges on his personal wiki page plus him claiming “this has already been discussed” on the Tag:office=lawyer talk page. This is certainly not sufficient discussion to make the wide-ranging change that started this topic. The wiki page Tag:office=lawyer must be reverted, and a proper tagging discussion must be held on the change.
I propose to have this discussion in its own topic. Clearly it is possible to evaluate multivalues, and on the other hand, expecting multivalues everywhere would eventually be expensive compared to just taking the value as it is. And for many tags, having more than one value would also be confusing, like maxspeed=50;30
Totally agree here. There are occasions (the majority of tags I guess) where having more than one value is not an option and I think most will agree with that.
This thread is about finding out what’s best in cases where both variants are an option.
OK, you are right, a general discussion about multi-tags doesn’t belong here and probably would lead to nowhere.
Regarding this specific topic, I think someone (@Fabi2?) should write a proposal so that we can agree on a tagging scheme. As long as both tagging possibilities are evenly used, the wiki page should document that situation instead of only describing one (or, alternatively, describe none of them).
Yes, but thinking about this seems to be very hard. This problem exists at least, as long as some amenity=restaurant are also an amenity=cafe.
Just because OsmAnd does preprocessing for the few healthcare-tags they use, this doesn’t mean that this is a good thing to do!
As already stated on the wiki, there was also no discussion about introduction of the lawyer specialities, why it was not OK to also improve the tagging in the same way?