When a shop has closed down inside a mall, what would be best practise to tag the store with? I feel “disuse” would be wrong, as another store has opened in the same locale. Would best practise be to simply delete the POI?
Is this shop gone? Just delete it. OSM is mapping the current state, not a history (though mostly gone objects are still mappable, for example ruins or remains of old railway).
disused:shop=convenience (or other values for other shop types) is a valid tagging where some remains of old shop are still present (unused shop equipment, signpost and so on).
Noone will map shops from aerial images so there is no good reason to leave things like removed:highway=… that may be useful to keep for some time to protect against remapping from outdated aerial images.
Thanks a lot. Makes sense what you explained.
If by “in the same locale” you mean the new shop (already mapped) occupies exactly same space as the old shop, you can delete it, only that usually people may prefer to re-tag the old shop (still dangling) into the new one in the first place.
As a personal preference, I would seize the opportunity to do some store front / indoor mapping for completeness.
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To clarify, you can add the old shop’s tags in prefixed form back to the new shop for context. I always try to avoid deleting anything. It’s up to you to either do it in this direction, or (as I prefer and recommend) conversely transferring the new shop back to the old shop. Then again, you can decide on how to deal with the now unused point.
I actually disagree with Mateusz here. It’s quite useful to retain information on recent previous occupants of shops. This happens for several reasons:
- People will often remember an old name of a shop (particularly if it was there for a long time) so will give you information about the local area with reference to former names of shops.
- If open data is available in an area the open data will often have older shop names and thus retaining the information assists in linking the open data.
- When updating OSM it is incredibly useful to have all shops (whether open or not) mapped, and recent former use helps this context. This greatly assists spotting ones which have changed.
- Older photographs will show old shop names & this enables the correct part of a building to be identified for use of such images for adding mapping detail (for instance S3DB features)
- Shop data is often associated with an address, deleting the shop node will delete entirely valid address data
I am not advocating using OSM as a historical directory of shops, but retaining enough information context to enable maintaining OSM to be as convenient as possible. This is rooted in some 9 years experience of our local community maintaining up-to-date data on shops in a couple of city centres.
If a shop has just been closed, I tag it as disused:shop=*. And don’t forget to add “disused:” to other functional tags too (excluding name, description, note etc.) to prevent find this closed shop when someone is looking for additional tags like cuisine, delivery and similar. If a shop is completeley gone and the place is empty, you can remove all tags and add shop=vacant.
This is a good practise, because this shop will be replaced by another one. And another mapper who knows that “C shop was there and B shop has been opened in this very place” can easily find this POI and add a new one. And it’s good to have a history of a place.
Deleting a point with shop/restaurant it’s not a good idea, because some tags won’t change, like wheelchair access. If the old shop wasn’t for wheelchair, the new one won’t be either.
A bit off topic: is there an efficient way to add the lifecycle prefixes to already existing tags? It’s really annoying to change them one by one.
Some OSM editors support “making the same change to multiple objects at once” - I’m pretty sure that JOSM does and I think that Potlatch 2 does as well (although I haven’t tested either just now).
Use a text editor, online or offline, to add prefix.
One of the few advantages of iD is a direct raw text editing interface, and iD 3 allows editing multiple objects (but be careful of different values).
In iD only copy and paste in raw editor.