On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 3:01 AM, Michael Krämer <ohr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Murry, > > being yet another German I'm afraid I still don't buy into the proposal. I > guess this has a lot to do with both cultural and language differences. > > Also some background to start with. For many people in at least > continental Europe bread is a basic food and a key component of the daily > diet. For example for me bread is the key ingredient for two meals of the > day. For this reason bread is something pretty relevant in daily life and > it's not only about having some kind of bread but also the type and > freshness of bread. > > Recently I've been travelling in France. Every morning one of the first > things has been to get some fresh bread. For this I used OSM and looked for > the next "artisan" bakery. A supermarket would also sell bread but that > would have been second choice only. There were also many shops selling > various treats but no the basic bread we were looking for. So to me this > basic distinction is really important. > > From my point of view another aspect is the occurence of bakeries. Both in > Germany and in France I expect to find a bakery more or less in every > village of reasonable size. This is not always a place where bread is baked > on the premises but at least in the morning there's a choice of various > types of bread etc. > > My personal experience from travelling in the US, the UK and Canada is > rather different. To get bread there I would rather go to a supermarket. To > me a bakery in these countries is less of a everyday shop but more special. > To me this is also reflected by the number of bakeries you've given for > Colorado. Here a more or less randomly picked query in Strasbourg, France: > http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/iv. This gives around 50 bakeries in an area > of about 30 square kilometers. I would claim from this that the relevance > of bakeries is significantly different between e.g. the US and Germany. > > As a conclusion I would argue that the tagging should be mainly tailored > towards the regions where bakeries are acutally found more often. Of course > the tagging must be applicable globally. But I am still in favour if having > the distiction between bakery, pastry and confectionery on the top-level > with shop=... > > Michael > > First an apology to Michael for what follows. I know you are allowing for change by addition of more shop=* tags, but the "tailored" statement makes me want to get on my soapbox. I know you are not arguing for the status quo. I would argue that tagging should also be tailored towards being useful for and not antagonizing to the local users and taggers of the general regions on the map. I would like for OSM to become a success in the U.S., or at least considered a viable alternative to the other major map systems; but if the average American finds it misleading, or can not find what they are looking for, they will not use it. In OSM's current state, I can not recommend it to non-technical family, friends, or acquaintances because it is too often wrong, or does not contain sufficient information for them to find what they seek. On the other hand, OSM should not be balkanized. So, I would never think of denying a local Mexican bakery the tag of shop=bakery, or shop=bakery; bakery_good=bread; or shop=bread (depending on what implementation is used) even though they do not carry bread as I usually think of it or (I believe) the average European understands it. An aside, I'm a fan of eating wheat tortillas like I would loaf bread, but unfortunately have to pass on the corn ones because of an allergy. It would be nice if the OSM tagging system were implemented such that what is of importance in one area, encourages taggers in another area, where they may have less importance, to use them in a similar way as opposed to using them in contrary ways or not tagging because such tags have a different meaning. If the latter is happening frequently, it is likely a sign of poor design and choice of tags, or where language differences exist, a poor matching of word translations. Importance and usefulness for one group is not a guide to good design if it is a poor implementation for (many) others. I would also think from the European viewpoint, or from anyone valuing good bread, having a map when visiting the U.S. that allows them to directly find that shop that specializes in artisan bread instead of having less than one chance in 20 would be a good thing. But if we keep the status quo, they will find most U.S. bakeries are cake shops or cookie shops or pastry shops or some combination that excludes bread. It is a given under the status quo, that mappers in the U.S. (hopefully only in U.S. territory) will tag bread, cake, cookie, pastry, pie, and other bakery goods shops shop=bakery. That U.S. users will feel frustrated because they can not get the information that they can easily get from Google or a business directory app on their smart phone. I can do a search for "bread shops near Colorado Springs" on Google maps and get a useful and manageable result. "Bakery shops near Colorado Springs" is useful but I need to do a lot more sifting of the results. I can even do "cobbler shops near Colorado Springs" which gives me mostly restaurants, but is a useful place to start my search; maybe they have a bakery counter (or takeout). I would like to be able to search (and tag) within OSM such that I get similar useful information. Following the status quo, I cannot. I think change is needed. The current choices make U.S. taggers hesitant to tag and is not as useful as needed to U.S. users. Bakery shops in the U.S. are not currently being tagged like the European expectation, nor are they ever likely to be - doing so would make them less useful here. While bakeries that specialize in bread may not be as important in the U.S. as in Europe, we are still talking about hundreds of such shops in the U.S. Thousands of shops of the other bakery types. (One 2011 industry study I found says there are 6000 retail bakeries in the U.S.). I would like to make tagging bread bakeries and the other bakery types useful and sensible for Americans, primarily as another small step towards OSM acceptance and use here. A question for the Europeans, how do you tag a retail shop that specializes in only cakes, or only cookies, or only pastries (wikipedia:en definition) or only pies/tarts; or do such businesses not exist there? If they do exist and are not identified as such, it tells me you are driving users from OSM to business directories or Google maps. So for solutions for the U.S.: The necessities: Distinguishing between the bakery types is important. To be a useful alternative to other mapping services, I need need something in the basic data that allows me to distinguish between bakery types, including something that differentiates a shop that specializes in bread from all the other types of bakeries. The tag shop=bakery is not working to identify a bread shop and it would be folly to assume it ever will in the U.S. since the first assumption of users and taggers here will be that it is a cake, pastry or pie shop; you get bread at a bread shop. The two most discussed of the alternatives: The bakery_goods:bread=yes style of tags added to shop=bakery. My preference for the reasons given in my previous long epistle. They would be a useful adjunct to some foreign specialty shops here, where bakery goods may be the second or third most important sales of the shop whereas other shops in the same category carry none. Use of differentiated shop tags: shop=bread, shop=cake, shop=pie, shop=pastry. I can work with this by putting multiple nodes within the retail space for shops with two or three of the categories and use shop=bakery for one that carries many. I will need the shop=bread tag or I can not make the OSM database useful for Americans. Sorry, you're stuck with shop=bakery generally meaning a cake store or bakery-goods-except-bread shop in the U.S.. I think it futile to try to teach U.S. users and taggers a misuse of their language. I would probably find it offensive if someone arbitrarily removed the shop=bakery tag from non-bread shops I entered or changed a (future) shop=bread entry to shop=bakery, and would change them back unless a better alternative existed. With any change, perhaps a locality page for the U.S. that lays out how mapping shops that sell bakery goods are tagged differently than in continental Europe is needed. I would hope one of the two above solutions or another good solution would make it unnecessary. Someone else may now have the soapbox :-) Murry
_______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
