[OSM-talk] New Google Maps style - interesting cartographic innovation

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> Il giorno 11 ago 2016, alle ore 18:03, David Fisher <djfisher81 at gmail.com> ha scritto:
> 
> Out of interest, do you also take issue with the central point of my
> last post -- that "landuse=retail" polygons may be seen as a similar
> sort of concept to Google's beige areas?  (assuming such polygons are
> placed by mappers who have at least a passing knowledge of the area in
> question)


I'm unsure where retail is the right choice. For shopping malls and big box stores and department stores, supermarkets, etc. it surely is, but in European city centres (the reality where I mostly map) you will typically find shops and offices and residential landuse in a mixture (plus churches, education, cultural usage (cinema, theatre, museums, etc.) restaurants, banks, etc.). Sometimes these areas, like the central pedestrian area you can find in most German cities, are mapped as landuse=retail as well.

The non-residential features are all mappable with common tags as individual pois, i.e. there can be 2 (or more) types of residential areas, those with just residences and those with a different use in part of the building. But the evaluation requires a lot if spatial analysis, while an explicit new landuse could save a lot of work. 

There's also an old proposal in the wiki, but it's not very much in use: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/centre_zone


cheers,
Martin