[Tagging] pastry and confectionery

[Murry McEntire]

On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 3:01 AM, Michael Krämer <ohrosm at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Murry,
>
> being yet another German I'm afraid I still don't buy into the proposal. I
> guess this has a lot to do with both cultural and language differences.
>
> Also some background to start with. For many people in at least
> continental Europe bread is a basic food and a key component of the daily
> diet. For example for me bread is the key ingredient for two meals of the
> day.  For this reason bread is something pretty relevant in daily life and
> it's not only about having some kind of bread but also the type and
> freshness of bread.
>
> Recently I've been travelling in France. Every morning one of the first
> things has been to get some fresh bread. For this I used OSM and looked for
> the next "artisan" bakery. A supermarket would also sell bread but that
> would have been second choice only. There were also many shops selling
> various treats but no the basic bread we were looking for. So to me this
> basic distinction is really important.
>
> From my point of view another aspect is the occurence of bakeries. Both in
> Germany and in France I expect to find a bakery more or less in every
> village of reasonable size. This is not always a place where bread is baked
> on the premises but at least in the morning there's a choice of various
> types of bread etc.
>
> My personal experience from travelling in the US, the UK and Canada is
> rather different. To get bread there I would rather go to a supermarket. To
> me a bakery in these countries is less of a everyday shop but more special.
> To me this is also reflected by the number of bakeries you've given for
> Colorado. Here a more or less randomly picked query in Strasbourg, France:
> http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/iv. This gives around 50 bakeries in an area
> of about 30 square kilometers. I would claim from this that the relevance
> of bakeries is significantly different between e.g. the US and Germany.
>
> As a conclusion I would argue that the tagging should be mainly tailored
> towards the regions where bakeries are acutally found more often. Of course
> the tagging must be applicable globally. But I am still in favour if having
> the distiction between bakery, pastry and confectionery on the top-level
> with shop=...
>
> Michael
>
>
First an apology to Michael for what follows. I know you are allowing for
change by addition of more shop=*  tags, but the "tailored" statement makes
me want to get on my soapbox. I know you are not arguing for the status quo.

I would argue that  tagging should also be tailored towards being useful
for and not antagonizing to the local users and taggers of the general
regions on the map. I would like for OSM to become a success in the U.S.,
or at least considered a viable alternative to the other major map systems;
but if the average American finds it misleading, or can not find what they
are looking for, they will not use it. In OSM's current state, I can not
recommend it to non-technical family, friends, or acquaintances because it
is too often wrong, or does not contain sufficient information for them to
find what they seek.

On the other hand, OSM should not be balkanized. So, I would never think of
denying a local Mexican bakery the tag of shop=bakery, or shop=bakery;
bakery_good=bread; or shop=bread (depending on what implementation is used)
even though they do not carry bread as I usually think of it or (I believe)
the average European understands it. An aside, I'm a fan of eating wheat
tortillas like I would loaf bread, but unfortunately have to pass on the
corn ones because of an allergy.

It would be nice if the OSM tagging system were implemented such that what
is of importance in one area, encourages taggers in another area, where
they may have less importance, to use them in a similar way as opposed to
using them in contrary ways or not tagging because such tags have a
different meaning. If the latter is happening frequently, it is likely a
sign of poor design and choice of tags, or where language differences
exist, a poor matching of word translations. Importance and usefulness for
one group is not a guide to good design if it is a poor implementation for
(many) others.

I would also think from the European viewpoint, or from anyone valuing good
bread,  having a map when visiting the U.S. that allows them to directly
find that shop that specializes in artisan bread instead of having less
than one chance in 20 would be a good thing. But if we keep the status quo,
they will find most U.S. bakeries are cake shops or cookie shops or pastry
shops or some combination that excludes bread.

It is a given under the status quo, that mappers in the U.S. (hopefully
only in U.S. territory) will tag bread, cake, cookie, pastry, pie, and
other bakery goods shops shop=bakery. That U.S. users will feel frustrated
because they can not get the information that they can easily get from
Google or a business directory app on their smart phone. I can do a search
for "bread shops near Colorado Springs" on Google maps and get a useful and
manageable result.  "Bakery shops near Colorado Springs" is useful but I
need to do a lot more sifting of the results. I can even do "cobbler shops
near Colorado Springs" which gives me mostly restaurants, but is a useful
place to start my search; maybe they have a bakery counter (or takeout). I
would like to be able to search (and tag)  within OSM such that I get
similar useful information. Following the status quo, I cannot.

I think change is needed. The current choices make U.S. taggers hesitant to
tag and is not as useful as needed to U.S. users. Bakery shops in the U.S.
are not currently being tagged like the European expectation, nor are they
ever likely to be - doing so would make them less useful here. While
bakeries that specialize in bread may not be as important in the U.S. as in
Europe, we are still talking about hundreds of such shops in the U.S.
Thousands of shops of the other bakery types. (One 2011 industry study I
found says there are 6000 retail bakeries in the U.S.). I would like to
make tagging bread bakeries and the other bakery types useful and sensible
for Americans, primarily as another small step towards OSM acceptance and
use here.

A question for the Europeans, how do you tag a retail shop that specializes
in only cakes, or only cookies, or only pastries (wikipedia:en definition)
or only pies/tarts; or do such businesses not exist there? If they do exist
and are not identified as such, it tells me you are driving users from OSM
to business directories or Google maps.

So for solutions for the U.S.:

The necessities: Distinguishing between the bakery types is important. To
be a useful alternative to other mapping services, I need need something in
the basic data that allows me to distinguish between bakery types,
including something that differentiates a shop that specializes in bread
from all the other types of bakeries. The tag shop=bakery is not working to
identify a bread shop and it would be folly to assume it ever will in the
U.S. since the first assumption of users and taggers here will be that it
is a cake, pastry or pie shop; you get bread at a bread shop.

The two most discussed of the alternatives:

The bakery_goods:bread=yes style of tags added to shop=bakery. My
preference for the reasons given in my previous long epistle. They would be
a useful adjunct to some foreign specialty shops here, where bakery goods
may be the second or third most important sales of the shop whereas other
shops in the same category carry none.

Use of differentiated shop tags: shop=bread, shop=cake, shop=pie,
shop=pastry. I can work with this by putting multiple nodes within the
retail space for shops with two or three of the categories and use
shop=bakery for one that carries many. I will need the shop=bread tag or I
can not make the OSM database useful for Americans. Sorry, you're stuck
with shop=bakery generally meaning a cake store or
bakery-goods-except-bread  shop in the U.S..  I think it futile to try to
teach U.S. users and taggers a misuse of their language. I would probably
find it offensive if someone arbitrarily removed the shop=bakery tag from
non-bread shops I entered or changed a (future) shop=bread entry to
shop=bakery, and would change them back unless a better  alternative
existed.

With any change, perhaps a locality page for the U.S. that lays out how
mapping shops that sell bakery goods are tagged differently than in
continental Europe is needed. I would hope one of the two above solutions
or another good solution would make it unnecessary.

Someone else may now have the soapbox :-)

Murry
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