[Speaking only from my own experience which is mostly US centric]
I think of a sports store (shop=sports) as being focused on ball sports (baseball, basketball, football, etc), other competitive team sports, and general fitness. Although I have seen golf specific stores, I’ve seen plenty of golf equipment at general sports stores too.
A ski shop (shop=ski) in my experience can be a different category of store, catering as much to the skier (and snowboarder) lifestyle as the sport itself. They carry casual clothing as well as technical winter wear and the ski equipment itself. In my area most of the ski shops switch their focus to bicycles in the summer (or are they bike shops switching their focus to skiing in the winter?). If renderers supported it, they’d be tagged shop=bicycle;ski. Many shop=outdoor are also bike and ski shops so accurate tagging would be shop=outdoor;bicycle;ski. Most of these stores sell clothing and footwear too, so I guess clothes;shoes could be added to the list as well . Rather hard to fit stores into such neat little categories.
For hunting, fishing, bicycle - I am not proposing migration to shop=sports + sport= - for variety of reasons, for start dedicated tags are in significant use already (but not only due to that).
But for sport=soccer, futsal, tennis, rugby_union, softball, pelota, ice_hockey, handball, volleyball, american_football, golf (and hundreds/thousands other values) it would be much easier for data consumers like iD editor, Organic Maps, Osmand and so on to be able to support generic shop=sports with specific sport(s) being tagged as a property.
shop=$SPORT_NAME tagging is far less usable, as requires dedicated support for specific sport value to be supported at all.
While cascading tagging like shop=sports sport=$SPORT_NAME allows to support “sport shop” in general with optional special support for some shop value.
This way new or rare sport shops still have some support in a reasonable way, making OSM data more usable.
If say sport=pickleball gets more popular new-top level shop=pickleball would require dedicated support, translations, entries to be supported at all. It would be nicer to have it appear as shop=sports sport=pickleball and be automatically supported as sport shop. Which is lower detail but will happen without extra work for say people making Organic Maps.
And anyone wishing to support special rendering/description for pickleball-focused shops can still do that. And in case of automated/semiautomated intepretation it is much easier to handle it when you know from shop=sports sport=pickleball tagging that pickleball (in this context) is supposed to be a sport. While shop=pickleball is not making it clear, and if we are unlucky pickleball is name of a food somewhere.
Having separate top-level tag for every single sport will just leave them unsupported and it is not reasonable from data consumers to expect supporting them. While cascading tagging (shop=sports sport=detailed_info allows providing the same info, in more structured way.
The sports listed firstly here are what are associated with a sports
shop, the big UK chain being Sports Direct. Golf shops are a different
thing, they exist as standalone shops. What are normally called sports
shops do not sell golf stuff in my experience.
Ski equipment is more associated with shop=outdoors, the same shops
that sell walking boots, climbing ropes. Go Outdoors sell ski
equipment, Sports Direct don’t.
Not all sports are competitive; they don’t need a winner.
Your point is valid, there are some activities that lie on the edge of being a sport or not. Indeed, I can find multiple sources suggesting SCUBA is a sport and multiple suggesting it is not. There are two PADI blog articles (1,2) that claim is both a sport and a leisure activity.
However, I don’t think we have to be an arbitrator of this. We could just say: some people consider it a sport and it fits neatly in our tagging schema, so let’s call it a sport for tagging purposes.
That’s another good example. I wouldn’t have considered it a sport but I can find multiple example references that do and multiple that don’t. However, based on my above suggestion I’d be happy to include it.
However, my point about shop=outdoor still stands. It is probably separate from shop=sport as they sell things like camping equipment - which surely isn’t a sport!
If darts is a sport, and professional darts is shown on TV sport channels then dominoes is too.
Fancy a game of dominoes in a pub is passtime level but once it is part of a league then it is certainly at sport level (leagues/teams/fixtures/commitment). Involves commiting yourself to turn up every week through the dark winter, travelling to away games. Certainly a sport.
Thank you for your answer. If I understand you correctly, you want to deprecate shop=ski/golf and “hundreds/thousands of other values” and replace them with shop=sports + sport=*. This would be necessary because shop=ski/golf would be a “bad idea”, “far less usable”, shop=sports + sport=* would be “nicer” and clearer (pickleball could also be a food) and would be easier to support. I would see this as a completely unnecessary patronizing of mappers. Every mapper can have his own ideas what is nice and usable.
For me, OSM is not a project that should make life as easy as possible for software developers, but OSM software should make life as easy as possible for mappers. It is certainly easier for mappers to directly select a preset for a specific shop type than to first select a preset for a more general shop type and then select a sport value from a list in a further step. Of course, a separate preset for golf shops could also set the tags shop=sports + sport=golf instead of shop=golf (compare pitch presets). But is that advantageous?
It is extremely important for mappers to be able to quickly retrieve additional information about tags and tag combinations that they want to use. The software should make this as easy as possible. I asked you where and how the different tag combinations for shop=sports + sport=* should be documented and you did not answer that. The current environment does not support the documentation of tag combinations well. There are no separate wiki pages for individual tag combinations that a help function could link to. There is also no wiki template that shows taginfo statistics for tag combinations. This makes it difficult to find out how much and where little-used tag combinations are used. Maybe this will change in the distant future, but until it has, and maybe it never will, I am generally not in favor of using tag combinations if it’s not necessary. And in the case of shop=ski/golf, I don’t see that it is necessary.
Carto shows a runner icon for shop=sports and a dot for shop=ski and shop=golf. A runner icon for shop=ski and shop=golf would be inappropriate. So it seems that Carto supports shop=ski and shop=golf better than shop=sports + sport=ski/golf. Was that difficult for them to do?
Missing tag for stop position causes extra preprocessing for routing software.
and asks people to map it manually, despite that it can be generated from route (marked on roads) + bus stop positions.
I consider it as good example for “approved proposals may include terrible and harmful ideas”
but idea of having thousands top level shop values like sport=pickleball is actually making life harder for mappers, especially ones which are newbies and not speaking English.
In such cases it is impossible to provide any kind of decent explanation/translation of shop meaning (without supporting hundreds or thousands of shop values - what requires translation, review at unfeasible scale).
If OSM data is obnoxious enough to process, to the point of being basically unusable then it gets a bit pointless.
“make life as easy as possible for software developers” is a bad goal, “make life possible for software developers” seems worth doing for me if OSM data is intended to be used and editable. Note that software developers make also editing software, and editors with richer interface than level0 raw tag and location editing are quite useful.
Or at least people should not expect any support for such tags, and should not be surprised when they are not supported. And should not ask for supporting say shop=volleyball (fortunately 0 uses right now).
note that vast majority of “hundreds/thousands of other values” are not yet in use (but I prefer to not appear in use).
And in for example iD interface (see bottom of cropped screenshot).
It does seems simple enough to not worth creating thousands of separate pages for each possible combination.
And documenting separate top-level shop value for each sport would not be easier anyway. Especially if you would want to have them in presets or translated.
Whilst I can see the point of depreciating shop=ski, It makes much more
sense to depreciate into shop=outdoors. These are the shops that sell
ski equipment along with summer walking/mountain gear.
I guess it depends, at least I am aware of lots of outdoor shops who don’t have any skiing gear in their offering (maybe they have clothes you could use for skiing). And specialized ski shops who don’t have a significant selection of other outdoor equipment.
agreed, bascially if you are skiing you have to know who locally
specializes in equipment. More often than not (at least around here)
they will also sell gear for other sports, so shop=ski would not be ok
here (but maybe somewhere it would). There are many nuances, I guess
it could depend a lot on the area (in the mountains the situation is
probably different than in flatter areas with not skiable hills
around), and maybe also season.
Related, there are also skater shops with a significant compartment of
snowboarding equipment.
Why hunting and fishing, but not ski & golf? Is it just usage (what are the stats)?
I view shop=sports as a sporting goods store. They sell a variety of items, often team sports as well as hunting, fishing, skiiing, bikes, and golf.
The line between shop=sports and =outdoor is fuzzy.
I looked at a few shops near me, the outdoor gear shops sell & rent skis, same with REI.
Is a subtag sport=ski acceptable with a shop=outdoor tag?
generally, I think there are sports shops (usually offering a selection of equipment for several sports), and shops dedicated to a single sport, like golf shop (where you cannot buy a basketball). There are also shops dedicated to competitive cycling (race bikes) and others that are just bike shops. Or specialized in electric bikes and vespas. Or shops selling equipment for shooting competitions. Not every shop that is dealing with a topic which can be used in competition is necessarily a sports shop. We also consider “chess” a sport, but would you propose to tag a chess shop with shop=sports?
I am completely and utterly unfamiliar with hunting, I never even seen hunting shop. So I do not want to propose deprecation of something where I know nothing
typically it is not treated as sport (but see (1) )
It has larger use
supported in some places
For fishing it is similar (OK, I went fishing exactly once and I visited fishing store twice to buy fishing line, last time to hang laser-cut wooden maps made of OSM data)
no idea, I never seen chess shop in my life, never seen photo of one, no idea what would they sell there, and not considered that they may exist so I prefer to not comment how to tag them (no idea what would they sell. Expensive chess sets that would be rather decoration than sport item anything else or some advanced chess clocks?)
If they sell a lot of ski equipment - I would say yes. Though I would consider mentioning other sports/activities (and despite being quite dubious about it being sport I would likely add sport=hiking;climbing;ski if it looks like I imagine, primarily selling hiking and climbing equipment to avoid indicating that it is only selling ski equipment)
Chess shops sell exactly this, plus cheaper chess sets (in addition to the expensive ones you mentioned), chess books, chess tables. I think many are only for mailorder but there are also some real shops where you can go.
. Rather hard to fit stores into such neat little categories.
