[OSM-newbies] Both amenity=social_centre and shop=books don't render on OSM

[Sebastian Arcus]

Hi Richard,

On 07/01/13 14:56, Richard Welty wrote:
> On 1/7/13 9:07 AM, Richard Weait wrote:
>> Not everything will render on every display.  Some objects will be
>> left out
>> as a matter of choice; a specialty golf course rendering might not show
>> libraries and playgrounds.  Some objects will be left out as a matter of
>> luck; some renderings choose to only render those objects that don't
>> collide / overlap with other objects.
>>
>> So, don't worry about what renders on which display.  Use available tags,
>> as correctly as you can.  Objects will still be findable in search, etc.
>>
> i think this is a point worth expanding upon:
>
> OSM consists of a Geo Database, and a suite of data consumers. the
> mapnik rendering on openstreetmap.org is not the only consumer of the
> data, there are various GPS apps that use it, various smartphone apps,
> and alternative websites like opencyclemap and openfiremap, and especially
> the suite of maps on itoworld
>
> so break free of the constraint of thinking that OSM is just the map
> rendered on www.openstreetmap.org, it's really much more than that.

Thank you for taking the time to share those extra details. I was aware 
of most info as I also use OSM maps on Navit for gps navigation. 
However, one friend of mine came to me and said something like "Hey, you 
are into this OpenStreetMap stuff - we have a meeting on X street by 
that Y bookshop. I wanted to have a link on my website for people to 
find it on OpenStreetMap instead of Google map, can you add that 
bookshop in?"

I understand what you've written above, but to many people OpenStreetMap 
is a way of providing an alternative to Google maps. To my mind (but I 
could be entirely wrong here), the Mapnik renderer is sort of a 
reference renderer to be looked up to - as it is part of the OSM 
project. So I always sort of expected it to be as complete as possible 
for common tags (but that's just a personal opinion, sort of an 
assumption). I was just wondering why something as common as a bookshop 
(which already has appropriate icons in Potlatch 2) doesn't even show up 
as a name on OSM (Mapnik).

Regards,

Sebastian