In my area there are shops which sell both optics such as glasses and contact lenses as well as hearing aids. How should I tag them? I could go for Or I could subjectively choose which one seems to be the main business and tag e.g. as asked 11 Mar '20, 21:04  hfs |
3 Answers:
It's a semi-official rule, and definitely general best practice, to avoid semicolon-separted values on "top-level" POI tags such as amenity, shop, and office. See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Semi-colon_value_separator#When_NOT_to_use My suggestion would be to make a call as to which is the primary purpose of the shop. If it's optical, then tag Sometimes it's a hard call to make, but I still believe that going with one over the other is a better call than a semicoloned value. It might also a good idea to add a description tag that mentions the multiple purposes of the shop, because some software may use Other commonly paired shops: coffee/tea, tattoo/piercing/jewelry, bakery/pastry, convenience/tobacco. When I see these I choose one value for It's worth noting that there are some shop types where using the equivalent answered 11 Mar '20, 23:08  jmapb |
It is worth considering answered 12 Mar '20, 08:32  Kovoschiz edited 12 Mar '20, 08:46 |
I've seen a few bakery/convenience combination tagged as two separated nodes on the same building. It feels a bit silly to duplicate name, contact and opening_hours, but I guess it's the easiest for data cousumer. answered 12 Mar '20, 10:44  H_mlet |
To me listing a plain
item=yesis rather more concerning in the difficulty to interpret and support in general. Afeature:item=yesoritem:activity=yeswould allowitemto be put as an option available underfeature, aside from less confusion with variousfeature. Although, as someone who appreciates namespacing I'm still wary of its possible limitationsAs a side note, medical devices can have access restrictions . For example, implanted cardiac devices (eg icd, artificial pacemaker) require magnetic shielding to protect against electromagnetic fields.
I agree that
*=yesis a less-than-ideal solution, but it's most widely implemented.For shops, the best-supported namespace tagging would probably be eg
sells:hearing_aids=yes, which would be a lot easier for software to parse (versus iterating through*=yesand guessing which ones refer to secondary shop purposes.) But "please don't list everything that a shop sells/every item on a restaurant menu/etc" is another traditional OSM best practice, so it hasn't gained a lot of traction.There's also some support for using
shop_1=*andalt_shop=*for secondary shop purposes.alt_shop=*would actually be my preferred solution to this problem, but it's so rarely used that it's barely worth mentioning.Using tobacco as an example:
tobacco=yes, 2 371 usessells:tobacco=yes, 174 usesshop_1=tobacco, 115 usesalt_shop=tobacco, 0 uses (the most common isalt_shop=beautyat 31 uses)