I wanted to tag a GNC franchise outlet in the United States and wasn't quite
sure what value to use for the shop key. I find that I'm not alone. Using
OpenLinkMap, I identified most of the current GNC outlets mapped in the US and
recorded the key:shop values ... all of the variants appeared once; if more
than once, the number is in parentheses:
shop=vitamin
shop=vitamins
shop=nutrition
shop=Health
shop=health
shop=herbalist (3)
shop=yes (2)
shop=pharmacy
shop=doityourself
(no shop tag) (2)
Depending how you look at it, this is either a healthy reflection of the
ability to tag anything with anything, or an indicator of the current anarchic
state of tagging :-) (the number found is also an indicator of the % coverage
for chain shops in general ... there are >6000 GNC stores in the United States)
Be that as it may, and allowing for variation from store to store, I'm
wondering if it might not be useful to identify a base tag value for shop
chains, allowing for additional values to be added if a particular location
varies from the chain template. Looking at the wikipedia article, "GNC
(store)", the informative categories used are "health food stores" and
"nutrition". Looking in TagInfo shows that the value "health_food" is
available for key:shop at about rank 170 with 57 uses; "nutrition" shows up as
three items in TagInfo, "nutrition" (20), "nutrition_supplements" (3) and
"nutritional_supplements" (1).
If one were to make a suggestion for a "base tag" for the GNC franchise, one
could, thus, go by the Wikipedia categorization and put it into both
"health_food" and "nutrition" as {{tag|shop|health_food;nutrition}}. This is
what I'll do on the shop I'm putting in now, but I wanted to bring this out to
stimulate conversation on whether or not a guideline of consistent baseline
tagging for stores in a chain might be beneficial to the OSM dataset or not.
The Wiki could be used to store the outcomes of discussions here.
--ceyockey
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