I would avoid public, when tagging schools as it had very different meanings 
on each side of the Atlantic.

I would suggest state and private.

 Phil
--

Sent from my Nokia N9



On 25/11/2012 23:58 Eugene Alvin Villar wrote:

Is this information something that should be placed in a geodatabase like OSM?

Or would this be better integrated into a separate school database. Maybe 
OpenSchoolDirectory? In that kind of database, you can include lots of 
information such as who is the principal, who operates the school, if the 
school is a public school or a private school, if it is sectarian or not, what 
the school's population is (and broken down per level), the number of 
classrooms for the school, etc.

Let OSM handle the geodata aspects of the schools (location, address, etc.) and 
leave it to other (hopefully open) databases to take care of those information.





On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 6:17 AM, Svavar Kjarrval <sva...@kjarrval.is> wrote:

Hi.

Like I stated in the proposal, it varies a lot between countries. I agree that 
there are different systems determining when children get into schools and here 
in Iceland it's defined as a year group. However, some countries have cut off 
dates which don't comply with the almanac year so it's not always Jan 1st to 
Dec 31st. That could be defined in another tag to make the information more 
granular. Without such a tag, one can at least know that the school educates 
children who become X old that year.

Regarding cases where the prefixed parts kind of answer the question, that's 
not always the case. Here in Iceland, we're lucky that the Ministry of 
Education keeps a list of all elementary schools (they're 175) and on said list 
there's only a handful of them which have any indication that they're 
elementary schools. This will most likely apply in other countries as well. 
Also, if such a data processing would cover the planet, it would be very 
time-consuming to derive such information in all the languages by hand, so said 
person would only want to cover areas with school names in a language he/she 
knows and if he/she has time to research the school system in each area to make 
such deductions. With this tag, the work is already done.

Example case:
When my neighbourhood was under construction, the elementary school there only 
served students for the first four years (of the mandatory 10) in the year 
2005. In the year 2006 it increased to the first 7 years, in 2008 the first 9 
years and finally included the 10th year in 2009. Even if the name had an 
indication that it was an elementary school, any deductions made from the 
age/year groups from reading the name would've been wrong. Also, that same 
elementary is also a kindergarten which makes it a bit harder to define from 
the name alone. So an age group, in that case, wouldn't have been such a bad 
idea. If OSM had progressed in 2005 as it has now, it would've been useful for 
many purposes to know that it didn't serve all 10 years of elementary school 
teaching.

After this proposal has been voted on, I intend to introduce a proposal to 
define school areas. Age groups can play a huge role, especially in the example 
case above, where children in certain school years were sent to a school in 
another neighbourhood. So the same neighbourhood was in the area of two 
schools, each educating children of different school years. Without this tag in 
the example case above, well, we'd be boned.

If anybody skips a year or repeats one, that's of course an exception this tag 
can't remedy.

I agree about the factoid you mentioned shouldn't be in the wiki page for the 
tag, should it be accepted. These were just examples of uses so you'd get the 
gist of what the data could be used for. It was not intended as ultimate or the 
best examples of use. I'll find a more general case before requesting a vote on 
the proposal.

- Svavar



On 25/11/12 21:07, Steve Bennett wrote:

Hi,
  With the exception of pre-schools, aren't most schools defined by the year 
group, rather than age? Around a here, a primary school is Prep to Grade 6, and 
high school is Year 7 to Year 12. The actual ranges of kids varies a bit - some 
skip years, some repeat. I can't see much use for coding an "age group".

To be honest, I'm not sure I even see the value in coding year groups - what 
does "year_group=7-12" tell you that "Blah Blah High School" doesn't? The use 
case of a parent choosing where to send their kids is such a rare one, and 
involves so much other research that I don't think having that factoid in OSM 
achieves much.

Steve




On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 11:08 AM, Svavar Kjarrval <sva...@kjarrval.is> wrote:

Hi.

The RFC process has started for my proposal to tag the age groups schools offer 
education for. More information is on the wiki page.

The proposal is at 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/age_group .

With regards,
Svavar Kjarrval

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