I am unsure on how you would like to label a building that contains multiple shops. This is very common in the US and so I have to presume this has been asked before, but I don’t seem to find it anywhere.
For example here is a building on OSM and in-person:
My issue is: this makes it look like there are now multiple buildings when it is just a single building split up. How should I go about separating them? If single point nodes are what should be done, how can it be denoted that the building contains vacant areas?
To me, indoor tagging makes sense since I’d like to see where each shop actually starts and stops. For example, the mall of America looks very chaotic since it’s a 3-story mall and the shops are just placed out randomly. How big is each store? I don’t know, I only know how big the 4 surrounding stores are.
But it looks like this is what we are doing, so I will revert my changes for the second strip mall since this is what most people are doing, thanks!
if you already drew the outlines of the shops you should keep them, it is better than a node representation if the outlines are reasonably correct. You can add level for the floor they are on
for parts of buildings (within an outline of the whole building) you can use building:part. Generally shops and buildings are different objects in OpenStreetMap and are not correlated (although both tags are frequently put on the same objects, which is accepted as a short cut but it is better to have different objects, especially where there are additional attributes that apply only to one)
