[OSM-talk] Confusion about baker(')s and butcher(')s

Mike Collinson mike at ayeltd.biz
Sun Oct 21 16:05:00 BST 2007


At 04:16 PM 21/10/2007, Christoph Eckert wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I'm just playing around with extracting POIs from the planet file. I'm 
>struggling with various tags for shops. According to the map features 
>page in the wiki, there's a dedicated shop key:
>shop=bakery
>shop=butcher
>shop=chandler
>shop=supermarket
>
>In the planet file, I also find them as amenities. Should those be 
>changed to "shop" or should we leave them as they are?
>
>What confuses even more are bakers and butchers. As the bakery exists, a 
>non native speaker would expect that butchery would be the correct 
>counterpart. But I read that this only is known to the southern 
>hemisphere, e.g. australia. In GB and the US, "Butcher's shop" or in 
>short "butcher's" gets used.
>
>I wonder if it was possible to unify them on the map features page, e.g.
>shop=baker
>shop=butcher
>shop=chandler
>shop=...
>
>Any comments from the northern and southern :) hemisphere?

(1) Before the shop= tag was introduced, the amenity tag was used.  Yes, it would be an excellent idea to migrate them over. I believe that was the intention.  The exceptions being banks and pharmacies as specific amenities.

(2) I did promise to tidy the Map Features page up after some mailing list discussion and failed. I'll get on to it.  The general consensus was that while some "suggested values" might be good, people should be free an encouraged to put their own tag values in.  

My personal feeling (having mapped north and south hemisphere!) is that it is good to encourage, but not enforce some sort of small global core set and also encourage folks in each country to harmonize some local values.  Global values would include shop=supermarket, shop=convenience, shop=bicycle that should work across all countries.  Local values include things like bakers, an example was quoted that in Anglo countries this is just one type of shop but in France it is two.  As a Brit, I've learned never to get between a Frenchman and food :-)

On the issue of endings - butcher, butcher's, butchers, butchers shop - I recommend harmonizing to a simple singular form: butcher.

Mike
Stockholm 






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