moving from amenity=embassy to office=diplomatic and differentiating embassy and consulate

[imagico]

Fixes #3886

Removes rendering of amenity=embassy and adds rendering of office=diplomatic + diplomatic=embassy and office=diplomatic + diplomatic=consulate using distinct symbols. Any other office=diplomatic will remain being rendered like other offices with a dot.

Symbol and label color is the same as for the office dots.

Reasoning for the switch of removing support for amenity=embassy and adding support for the new tagging: The new tagging has proven to have replaced the old tagging in practical mapping and is broadly being adopted by mappers. Of the 6200 remaining amenity=embassy features nearly 1500 have also an office=diplomatic tag. Currently >6000 features would be rendered in the distinct forms introduced by this change, another ~1500 office=diplomatic would remain being rendered with the plain office dots.

Having a distinct symbol for diplomatic=consulate helps avoiding abuse of diplomatic=embassy as tagging for the renderer. Other values of diplomatic=* are either not widely used or are not consensus among mappers.

Examples:

[grischard]

it’s always cool to see something you’ve mapped used as an example in a PR :)

[kocio-pl]

I like this proposition in general, however I see two things to be discussed:

1. The consulate icon proposition includes a person - what is the rationale for this? Wouldn't a smaller flag be enough here?

2. Even if the old embassy tag is deprecated and losing ground, it's still both over our traditional limits for rendering features and like a half of its top amount, so still a lot:

Removing it right now sounds like an invitation for a mass retagging, which would be bad for the database quality, of course. I think that it'd be much safer to wait until it goes below ~2k uses.

[imagico]

The reason for displaying a person with diplomatic=consulate is to indicate this provides a public service of some sort. There are other classes of diplomatic offices that do not and might be in the future differentiated by a symbol without a person.

As indicated in #3886 keeping the previous rendering while introducing a new rendering for the new tagging scheme is out of the question - it would be confusing for mappers and would be bad cartography - short: It would be against several of our documented goals here.

[kocio-pl]

I have never seen any documented goal to do changes in one step. It's better to ask people what they will find better than claim for them. I personally see no more confusion there than in the whole idea of migrating things and avoiding automated mass changes, which is crucial issue when designing tags - nobody likes that complication, but it's there for a reason.

I'd like to hear some more details about symbol design. So embassies are just general representation of the country, while consulates are different than them and deal more with people? I'm not sure that is the main difference. Smaller flag for consulates makes sense for me, since they're clearly subordinated.

[imagico]

I am not going to revisit the question of rendering tags as synonyms here - we have done that plenty of time. If you want to re-visit that topic please open a separate issue and state any new arguments.

In any case what is important here is that there is no consensus on adding distinct rendering for office=diplomatic without at the same time (or before) removing amenity=embassy. If it is too early for that change is something that can be discussed obviously.

The difference between an embassy and a consulate is that an embassy is an official representation of a country abroad. It serves diplomatic purposes mostly. A consulate mostly provides services to either the host or the home country citizens. Hence it is more service oriented and therefore the symbol with a person. Most embassies also provide consular services but tags to indicate that are so far not very well established.

[imagico]

Ok, there do not seem to be any objections to the design aspect of this change. I would like to make a decision to either merge this or to close this because we are not ready to move to the new tagging scheme. I think these are the only two directions for which consensus is achievable. Any comments on which of these is preferred is welcome.

[jeisenbe]

I'm in favor of this idea. While I have personally felt ambivalent about the switch to office=diplomatic, it appears the mappers have been willing to change the tags and there is a clear trend toward use of the new scheme. Since the main benefit of this change is to distinguish consulates from embassies, this PR is the right idea. However, I have not reviewed the PR technically, yet. Perhaps I will have time in a few days.

[kocio-pl]

I am not going to revisit the question of rendering tags as synonyms here - we have done that plenty of time. If you want to re-visit that topic please open a separate issue and state any new arguments.

I don't remember any other argument than "it's been documented", so it would be good to prove this, since you brought it here yourself.

On the other hand I don't remember you referring to the argument about mass edits, so it would also be good to hear that.

If it is too early for that change is something that can be discussed obviously.

OK, I asked the question here:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2020-July/085115.html

Hence it is more service oriented and therefore the symbol with a person. Most embassies also provide consular services but tags to indicate that are so far not very well established.

I understand this, but the problem is that's not a clear difference in reality, and I think just a smaller flag would be enough, since it also changes symbol proportions. Maybe making a gap a little bigger could be used to make it more distinct.

[imagico]

Note i have no strong desire to see this change being merged - if the general feeling is that it needs more time for mappers to adopt the new tagging until we can do this that is fine with me. I just saw strong desire being expressed to render the new tagging and wanted to show and offer a suitable implementation for this that provides useful feedback to mappers to demonstrate that it is not the lack of a viable design solution that prevents addressing #3886.

Note right now we have - as mentioned on talk - 4611 features with amenity=embassy only - that is down from 6692 at the beginning of the year according to #3886 (comment).

During the same time span the use of diplomatic=embassy/consulate (which this change would add being rendered in a distinct and feedback providing form) rose from 2769+927 to 4901+1905 - i.e. it almost doubled. Given that embassies and consulates are probably a class of objects where the majority of real world features that exist are already mapped in OSM the usefulness of feedback through the map is highest while mappers adopt the new tagging and assess the nature of existing features for the new tagging scheme. This is different from previous changes like landuse=farm/landuse=farmland or highway=ford/ford=yes where the usefulness of mapper feedback always was and still is predominantly in the future.

I don't think differentiating embassies and consulates with just a large/small flag symbol would be desirable. This distinction as explained is not one of size or importance, it is one of qualitatively different function.

[jeisenbe]

While I was personally ambivalent about the change in tagging from amenity=embassy to office=diplomatic, the numbers clearly show that many mappers have embraced the new tag. In the past month several hundred more office=diplomatic features have been tagged, and a couple of hundred amenity=embassy have disappeared.

I believe it is reasonable to merge this PR now.

[jeisenbe]

@imagico - please merge this if you agree

[kocio-pl]

What I miss in this design is lack of clear extensibility - they are carefully crafted for exactly 2 cases. This is not a blocker for me, but do you think it could be extended for all the other diplomatic offices?

Since nobody on the list commented for a long time, I think it's safe enough to test this change and see how it impacts tagging changes.

[imagico]

What I miss in this design is lack of clear extensibility - they are carefully crafted for exactly 2 cases.

I am not sure what you mean by this. Could you point to POI symbol additions from the past 2-3 years where you see a clearer extensibility than with this?

[kocio-pl]

No, I was not thinking about anything else, I just focused on this proposition.

[imagico]

As i said i am not sure what you mean with that remark. An example would have helped.

[grischard]

The world of diplomatic structures tends to be relatively static. If another type of office=diplomatic comes along one day and becomes significant enough, we can amend the rendering to add it. I'm glad this is now merged.

I'm also amused that @jeisenbe has also used something I've mapped as an example. Are you guys following me? :)

[imagico]

Luxembourg is a popular test area for testing in central Europe since the country extract is small and does not take a lot of space in a test database. I used Strasbourg as sample because i have no national capital in my test database and therefore Strasbourg was about the only location with a feature tagged diplomatic=embassy.

[jeisenbe]

Also fixed #3737