On 09/03/2014 11:26 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote: > Another thing that comes to my mind: maybe we could indeed create this > catalogue of tens of thousands of business types - who if not us will be > able to do such a work? This doesn't imply the mapper would have to scroll > long lists of thousands of entries, it could be well structured from coarse > to fine.
I too wondered about this problem. The current shop/craft tagging seems *very* broken for everything non-standard. We can't expect people to invent new tags for every type of service or merchandise, such as "tractor repair" or "chimneys". "You can use any tags you want", but think of the software, how can it deliver relevant results then? Think what people *need*. When they go to Google Maps, they don't look for a supermarket or grocery, they look for some specialized stores/services. Another issue is that people passionately add OSM notes for businesses there's no approved tagging for. I too, thought independently, about these human-readable description tags like shop:merchandise:<language> and how idiots (of which we have an abundance already) or diary spammers (who laugh in admins' faces) will abuse it. But who knows, this may be a viable solution. Compare with "Business Name" at https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en&ref_topic=4540086 . So, I checked how Google does this. And here you have all the 2200+ POI categories you can choose from when you add your business/institution/whatever. http://pastebin.com/BHqXvkS4 It seems they flattened their hierarchy here, for instance every cuisine has its own restaurant tag.. I guess internally there's some tree of categories, so that searching non-specific terms returns meaningful results. Anyway, our shop/service tagging system is quite flawed in its current form and is suitable for consumption only at a basic level. This presents an issue that too few people think of OSM as an ecosystem. We have disjoint teams (or individuals) developing tagging/website/editors/map style/map applications. This isn't good for creating a map that would serve users' needs (couldn't help myself but write the proverbial "displace Google Maps" ;-) ) Greetings Michał _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
