Just the past 3 years, because of funerals of my family or friends, I have visited 2 different public funeral homes in Taiwan, plus another big public funeral home next to my house, I now know 3 funeral homes in Taiwan, the experience makes me want to dig more about the coverage of it on osm and maybe contribute about it.
At first times I visit there, my grandma was sent to be incremented, so I thought the funeral home is just a crematorium place, so I tag it on OpenStreetMap as amenity=crematorium. However, After the second time I go to another funeral home, I realize not every funeral home has crematorium facility. In funeral home, it’s main function is a morgue and a place for people’s gathering to say some “in memory of our best…” things. Because of the feature of service they provide, public funeral homes are rather be in a easy to reach location. Most of the time, cemeteries are not close to the public funeral homes in Taiwan.
After these discoveries, I am confused. What could I do to tag funeral home? the closest definition I can find is “amenity=place_of_worship”. But it’s very strange if I tag this on funeral homes, since they only worship gods when people’s beloved ones are going to gods’ world.
I keep looking it up on osm wiki. Wow, finally I found out there’s a proposed map feature as “amenity=funeral_home”.
Great relief, I would say.