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?
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