It is quite common for a community centre or school hall to be used for various different purposes, outside of whatever its primary purpose might be. For example it might be used by a dance club on Wednesday nights, a taekwondo class on Thursday, AA on Friday, and by a church group on Sunday. I found thanks to this answer that, unfortunately, OSM explicitly does not encourage representing these activities.

Nevertheless, it is very useful for people to be able to navigate to and search these sorts of activities & groups. For example, if I’m attending a new sports club for the first time, it’s much easier to type into my navigation app the name of the sports club, rather than look up the street address or the name of the host venue. In Google Maps this works perfectly for groups established enough to have an entry in their database.

Is there any equivalent of this that relies on OSM for mapping data, with an open/editable database of groups & organisations that do not have a fixed ‘address’ visible from the outside?

  • gigachad@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    2 days ago

    I am not sure about that. But regarding the discussion, some of the people involved suggest to place multiple nodes next to each other and that is what I would too. Of course only if the room is shared by let’s say, a maximum of 5, but not 1,000.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I certainly could do that. I don’t know that I’d want to do it if it goes against the community norms and expectations of OSM, though.

      • gigachad@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        2 days ago

        It was already said in the thread, it is not really the main focus of OSM. But who cares? I know so many scientists using OSM to collect whatever obscure data. And if you want to look for opening times of your local food bank then that is a valid use case, even if it is a strip club on Tuesdays. I don’t want to use google maps for looking that up.

        The line to draw where it is too many nodes is a bit fuzzy though. But if one mapper adds 1000 “office rooms” to one building entry, it gets confusing pretty fast. Also, who is going to maintain that? Nobody. But a handful of amenities - do it.