[Talk-us] Tagging outdoor US shopping centers

[Doug Hembry]

I'm a relative newbie, and here's a question I've been puzzling over for 
a while: What's the best practice for tagging a north American outdoor 
shopping center?  For example, often, on an intersection between major 
suburban streets, there are collections of stores, in one or multiple 
buildings, grouped around one or more shared car parks. And they have 
names ("Cornerstone", "Kings Court",... or whatever).  Sometimes there 
are four groups of stores, one on each quadrant of the intersection, 
with four different names. In the past, someone may have tagged the 
whole general area with landuse=retail (or landuse=commercial -  not 
sure why the difference),  but the map doesn't know of,  nor display,  
the distinct identities (which are frequently used locally in ads, etc). 
How to incorporate these distinct names, and if possible have mapnik 
display something? I have considered or seen several ways:

1.  Split a big generic landuse=retail area into multiple smaller 
landuse=retail  polygons, one for each shopping area. Then there are 
issues about whether adjacent areas should share boundary nodes with 
each other, or with separating roads. It gets complicated, and tedious 
to implement.

3. I've seen place=locality used on a single node with a name=*. It 
displays, but place=locality is supposed to describe an uninhabited 
region, according to the wiki.

4. Is this a legitimate use of the site relation? Buildings, shops, car 
park areas, gas stations, etc, could be grouped together and named, 
perhaps with a label tag, and no explicit boundary way required. The 
boundary of a shopping center is usually  fairly obvious when viewing 
the map - a drawn boundary might not be considered essential. This is 
attractive, but are site relations approved at this point, and will 
Mapnik display their names (I know... don't map for the renderer...)? 
Plus, I've never seen this used.

Breaking up a big landuse=retail area seems clumsy and problematic. And 
I suspect the usage of landuse=retail is supposed to be a generic, 
"broad brush" classification of a  whole region rather than a way of 
identifying smallish distinct contiguous areas, identical except for 
their names. What I think I need is a shop=shopping_center tag  (or 
shopping_centre, if our European colleagues insist :) ),  applied to 
either a strategically placed node or a newly defined boundary way. But 
it doesn't exist, strangely. Note that shop=mall isn't right, because 
malls are explicitly indoors. Maybe it's only here in California, where 
it never rains ( dark humor. At least until very recently) that we have 
this phenomenon of outdoor shoping areas, but I don't think so. Note 
also that single isolated shopping areas are not a problem - the 
landuse=retail area can simply be given a name=* tag.  But for the more 
complicated cases - any suggestions?