On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 12:51 PM, <dies38...@mypacks.net> wrote:
> I wanted to tag a GNC franchise outlet in the United States and wasn't quite
> sure what value to use for the shop key. I find that I'm not alone. Using
> OpenLinkMap, I identified most of the current GNC outlets mapped in the US
> and recorded the key:shop values ... all of the variants appeared once; if
> more than once, the number is in parentheses:
>
> shop=vitamin
> shop=vitamins
> shop=nutrition
> shop=Health
> shop=health
> shop=herbalist (3)
> shop=yes (2)
> shop=pharmacy
> shop=doityourself
> (no shop tag) (2)
>
> Depending how you look at it, this is either a healthy reflection of the
> ability to tag anything with anything, or an indicator of the current
> anarchic state of tagging :-) (the number found is also an indicator of the %
> coverage for chain shops in general ... there are >6000 GNC stores in the
> United States)
>
> Be that as it may, and allowing for variation from store to store, I'm
> wondering if it might not be useful to identify a base tag value for shop
> chains, allowing for additional values to be added if a particular location
> varies from the chain template. Looking at the wikipedia article, "GNC
> (store)", the informative categories used are "health food stores" and
> "nutrition". Looking in TagInfo shows that the value "health_food" is
> available for key:shop at about rank 170 with 57 uses; "nutrition" shows up
> as three items in TagInfo, "nutrition" (20), "nutrition_supplements" (3) and
> "nutritional_supplements" (1).
>
> If one were to make a suggestion for a "base tag" for the GNC franchise, one
> could, thus, go by the Wikipedia categorization and put it into both
> "health_food" and "nutrition" as {{tag|shop|health_food;nutrition}}. This is
> what I'll do on the shop I'm putting in now, but I wanted to bring this out
> to stimulate conversation on whether or not a guideline of consistent
> baseline tagging for stores in a chain might be beneficial to the OSM dataset
> or not. The Wiki could be used to store the outcomes of discussions here.
Yes, this is a common problem in OSM. I first noticed it when I went
to tag my local Staples. I've had thoughts about creating some kind of
template on the wiki to document chain stores and what tags to use on
them but... well, I haven't run out of things to map yet so the time I
spend on the wiki isn't all that great.
As for using two values, I would discourage that. In theory that's a
great way to use two values for one key but in practice pretty much
nothing parses and supports multiple tag values. So I usually just
pick one and go with it.
Toby
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