More shop types / better handling of shops with unsupported types.

[osm-spiregrain]

It might be useful to have

1. More shop types available in the schema; and/or
2. A 'catch-all' shop (a dot?) for shops without types;

The current handling of shops with unsupported types is to present address information as text - not the shop name or an icon. This creates a scenario in (say) large shopping malls were most of the shops appear as dozens of identical free-floating text taken from addr:housename.

See here: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/51.543368/-0.006215&layers=S

[joto]

The rendering in that map is a problem of the style, not shortbread.

But I agree that we should probably have a catch-all for shops. How to render that is not our job here though.

[osm-spiregrain]

Thanks Joto - is this report sufficient to note the likely need for a catch-all for shops?

[pnorman]

Would a catch-all be best expressed with features with yes for the shop attribute, or as the value of the shop tag?

i.e. should a node with shop=foo turn into a point with shop=foo or a point with shop=yes

[SomeoneElseOSM]

Would a catch-all be best expressed with features with yes for the shop attribute, or as the value of the shop tag?

I'd personally just write out the value of the shop tag. Map styles can always add a catch-all for "any shop value not in a list for which they have individual icons for or want to ignore".

84% of shops have names (see https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/shop#combinations ) so I suspect there would be a bit of a tile size saving to rewrite rare values as shop=yes, but not much.

Whether "all shop values" counts as a breaking change (and so should not be in 1.1) I'm not sure (see https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/demo-of-new-vector-style-for-osm/144551/132 ). There are > 3000 shop=no, for example.

[joto]

Thinking a bit more about this I am reversing my position: I don't think it is a good idea to provide a catch-all.

One reason is that we'll get a lot of rubbish in there, too. Look at https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/shop#values and you'll see a lot of rubbish tags. I don't want to have a dot on the map for shop=steel_rods(sariya),_and_other_iron_works_related_to_construction. You could argue that that's just a few here and there and not be bothered about it but I'd rather have clean data in my maps.

So other reason: It doesn't get us looking at values closely and removing some. @SomeoneElseOSM already mentioned shop=no. There is also shop=vacant (about 80.000) and shop=mall (which seems wrong to me a mall has several shops which should be tagged individually), storage_rental (which I wouldn't think of as a shop), and probably more that wouldn't get the discussion and scrutiny they should get before being included.

There aren't even 200 types of shops that appear more than 1000 times in the database. That list is not so long that we couldn't look through it occasionally and update the list in the specs.

[SomeoneElseOSM]

To take shop=vacant as an example, it's clearly not a shop and shouldn't be displayed in the same way as one, but a map style might like to have the choice whether to include it or not, and show it in such as way that "is obviously not a shop that is open": e.g. something like https://map.atownsend.org.uk/vector/index.html#20/52.9572317/-1.1471727 .

[joto]

@SomeoneElseOSM Sure, but that's a very niche use and so nothing to consider for Shortbread.

[matkoniecz]

There aren't even 200 types of shops that appear more than 1000 times in the database.

What about a bit rarer ones that are not garbage?

(I have somewhere lists of valid shop values, problematic shop values and list of garbage shop values, would be happy to share the first one or make PR if it would be useful)