Tagging a combined shop of optician and hearing aids

In my area there are shops which sell both optics such as glasses and contact lenses as well as hearing aids. How should I tag them?

I could go for shop=optician;hearing_aids. But then my question is if the shop will be found by data users? This combination appears only 29 times (and 11 times the other way round) globally according to taginfo.

Or I could subjectively choose which one seems to be the main business and tag e.g. as shop=optician and add a note about the hearing aids in a description tag.

asked 11 Mar '20, 21:04

hfs
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3 Answers:

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It's a semi-official rule, and definitely general best practice, to avoid semicolon-separted values on "top-level" POI tags such as amenity, shop, and office. See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Semi-colon_value_separator#When_NOT_to_use

My suggestion would be to make a call as to which is the primary purpose of the shop. If it's optical, then tag shop=optician + heading_aids=yes, and visa-versa.

Sometimes it's a hard call to make, but I still believe that going with one over the other is a better call than a semicoloned value.

It might also a good idea to add a description tag that mentions the multiple purposes of the shop, because some software may use description= but not look for various *=yes tags.

Other commonly paired shops: coffee/tea, tattoo/piercing/jewelry, bakery/pastry, convenience/tobacco. When I see these I choose one value for shop= and put the other as a key with value yes.

It's worth noting that there are some shop types where using the equivalent *=yes might be confusing, for example bicycle=yes is usually an access tag, pet=yes usually refers to permission to bring pets to a POI (though pets=yes is more common for this purpose.)

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answered 11 Mar '20, 23:08

jmapb
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accept rate: 22%

To me listing a plain item=yes is rather more concerning in the difficulty to interpret and support in general. A feature:item=yes or item:activity=yes would allow item to be put as an option available under feature, aside from less confusion with various feature. Although, as someone who appreciates namespacing I'm still wary of its possible limitations

As a side note, medical devices can have access restrictions . For example, implanted cardiac devices (eg icd, artificial pacemaker) require magnetic shielding to protect against electromagnetic fields.

(12 Mar '20, 08:20) Kovoschiz

I agree that *=yes is a less-than-ideal solution, but it's most widely implemented.

For shops, the best-supported namespace tagging would probably be eg sells:hearing_aids=yes, which would be a lot easier for software to parse (versus iterating through *=yes and guessing which ones refer to secondary shop purposes.) But "please don't list everything that a shop sells/every item on a restaurant menu/etc" is another traditional OSM best practice, so it hasn't gained a lot of traction.

There's also some support for using shop_1=* and alt_shop=* for secondary shop purposes. alt_shop=* would actually be my preferred solution to this problem, but it's so rarely used that it's barely worth mentioning.

Using tobacco as an example:

tobacco=yes, 2 371 uses
sells:tobacco=yes, 174 uses
shop_1=tobacco, 115 uses
alt_shop=tobacco, 0 uses (the most common is alt_shop=beauty at 31 uses)

(12 Mar '20, 14:56) jmapb

It is worth considering craft=optician or craft=hearing_aid if either is "crafted" to some degree on site (keeping the possible ambiguity of shop= vs craft= in mind), and healthcare=optometrist or healthcare=audiobiologist if a practicing registered medical specialist is at the shop.

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answered 12 Mar '20, 08:32

Kovoschiz
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accept rate: 16%

edited 12 Mar '20, 08:46

1	I've seen a few bakery/convenience combination tagged as two separated nodes on the same building. It feels a bit silly to duplicate name, contact and opening_hours, but I guess it's the easiest for data cousumer. permanent link answered 12 Mar '20, 10:44 H_mlet 5.4k●17●81 accept rate: 13%

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question asked: 11 Mar '20, 21:04

question was seen: 2,937 times

last updated: 12 Mar '20, 14:57

Tagging a combined shop of optician and hearing aids

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