[OSM-talk] [Tagging] Restaurants/Fast Food

[Mike Collinson]

Ed,

I also map eating places in reasonable detail as it will be very useful when OSM search engines expand to local POI searches, as I am sure they will.  We are in a distinct minority at the moment so I suggest personal experimentation and then make specialist proposal(s) if no one else does.

 From experience, it is best to have as few general qualitative tag values as possible so that they are memorable and do not require great thought in choosing which one to use. For eating places that is amenity = restaurant, cafe, fast_food. If they are used without any supporting tags, they still give a reasonable though not precise indication of what the decor is going to be like and what you might have to pay even though the distinction can be blurry as you rightly point out - is the local bistro a cafe or restaurant?  Any more categories and it gets really difficult.

Then carefully add specialist tags which most folks can cheerfully ignore or add later.

As far as I know, there has been no proposals covering takeaway, delivery, drive_thru =yes/no.  I think they'd make a good addition, I'll join you adding them.

Do feel free to just go ahead and add new specialist tags to the database.  I am a great and active proponent of Map Features as a place to gradually evolve a coherent set of globally useful tags but it is only part of the way forward. I, for example, map gluten_free=yes because it is has a reasonably clear meaning in context, is of great interest to me, may be useful to others but of very minority interest.

Also have a look at:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Map_Features amenity = restaurant, cafe, fast_food

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Key:cuisine - I find this really useful.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Key:description - Useful for adding anything that does not fit a specific tag

Mike

At 11:45 AM 9/09/2008, Ed Loach wrote:
>Is it only me that finds these two classifications a bit limiting? How do other people use them?
>
>I'm thinking of say a restaurant where you could dine in the restaurant, order takeaway at the counter, drive through and order at the window, or phone for a delivery. Do I class that as a restaurant? Or does it depend on the type of food they sell (that you can drive through suggests fast food in this example).
>
>There are also takeaways where the service is anything but fast, especially if they also have a busy eat-in restaurant section.
>
>What I would have preferred is have "takeaway" as an option and then have say for places where you can eat in:
>
>amenity=restaurant
>takeaway=yes/no
>drive_thru=yes/no
>delivery=yes/no
>
>and where you can't eat in
>
>amenity=takeaway
>drive_thru=yes/no
>delivery=yes/no
>
>Which makes me consider that there may be places that only deliver, and perhaps amenity=fast_food would be suitable for those? I don't think there are any round here though; most of the delivery places also allow you to collect if you wish.
>
>So far I've been tagging some of the local takeaways as restaurant even if they don't have an eat in area if I don't think of the type of food that they sell as "fast food" - e.g. say Indian or Chinese takeaways where you get the same standard of food as in the equivalent restaurant, wait as long for it to be prepared, but take it away in cartons rather than eating it on the premises - but feel that I should go back and revisit them. The reason is that there is a KFC restaurant that I do think of as fast food, but has an eat in area (as well as drive thru and takeaway options). It feels wrong tagging it as fast food though when it is more of a restaurant than the takeaways that I've tagged as restaurant.
>
>Thanks for reading. If this has already been discussed I'm still fairly new; if there is a similar proposal on the wiki then I find the wiki next to impossible to find anything in and have taken to bookmarking any interesting pages mentioned on this list so I can find them again easily.
>
>Ed
>
>
>
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