Hey, I’m new to mapping and I’ve been spending quite some time this last week mapping the town of Red Cliffs, Victoria in Australia. I have a question about how I should handle mapping a particular Chemist in the town. The exact shop is TerryWhite Chemmart, this link will hopefully take you straight there (I’m not sure). But if it doesn’t, there’s only one TerryWhite Chemmart in the town so it should be pretty easy to find manually.
As you can see, there’s another building above TerryWhite Chemmart. When walking around town, that building looks like it’s just a couple of empty shops. That note I placed on it was because I wasn’t sure whether they were actually a couple of vacant shops, or if it was just a back storage area of some sort for TerryWhite Chemmart.
Well, today I walked into TerryWhite Chemmart myself to ask them, and they confirmed to me that the above shops are indeed their storage area, and that it leads all the way to the massage shop (the massage shop is the partly visible building at the top of the screenshot).
But I forgot to ask them if it’s actually the same building or not (It’s hard to tell from surveying, because all the shops in the street look like they’re connected). On Bing satellite imagery in iD, there is a split between them, which makes it look like they are two separate buildings.
My question is: If they are indeed two separate buildings, that are connected to each other but are both being used by TerryWhite Chemmart, should they be marked as separate buildings, or should they be combined as though they are one building?
(I tried share a second screenshot example, but it won’t let me because I’m new to the forums).
The POI for the chemist should be extracted from the building and represented as a node with level=0, so that the building way(s) can represent the complex details there.
I’ve never used level= before in my mapping. I looked up the documentation for it and it seems to be for mapping the number of floors a building has. This chemist is only a one-story building. So, when I was talking about the building “above” it, I meant ‘above’ as in the building north of the chemist, which is touching the chemist because it is directly next to it.
Really? I thought the standard practice was to not use nodes for individual shops on shop buildings, unless the building is home to more then 1 shop (eg. a shopping centre that may have hundreds of shops in the same building). Most if not all of the shops in the town of Red Cliffs when I began mapping, were just buildings with the shop names and shop details put on them. There weren’t any individual nodes placed on them. I’ve since placed a few nodes around, such as the liquor section of the Ritchies grocery store, its drivethrough, a community notice board and clock on the TerryWhite Chemmart building, and other things like planters and benches and trees. You can see here in this screenshot that most of the shops don’t have nodes on them.
It is popular, but is causing variety of problems.
Note that many people are entirely fine with it, and it is far better to map shop and building as one object over not mapping them.
But it is, at least, entirely fine to map them as separate objects. Especially when shop takes multiple buildings, or part of one, or building has own name or anything complex is happening.
Okay, so should I make these changes to the chemist, then?
Remove the name of the chemist building
Create a point/node for the TerryWhite Chemmart shop on the chemist building
Transfer the shop details (phone number, hours etc.) from the building feature to the new node
Is that correct? If that is correct, where should I place the node? At the entrance? If I should place the node at the entrance of the shop, then what if the shop has multiple entrances? TerryWhite Chemmart has two entrances for example. One is at the East end, and the other is at the South end of the building.
I typically see shop nodes at shop center or near one of entrances. I would not worry too much about selection here.
If shop is mapped as area then choice is made by data consumers (they typically place label and/or icon at center of area in such cases), mapping as area allows to attach entrances to shop area though admittedly this info is currently rarely used.
POIs can be mapped in a range of different ways, different mappers have different opinions on what’s correct, so there’s no right answer.
A node inside the building is fine, a node at the entrance along the building outline is fine , tags in the (southern) building part are fine to represent the shop area, or a way that shares nodes with the building that covers both buildings to represent the overall occupied premises would be fine too.
When buildings are close together like this, it can be hard to determine if they are structurally different buildings or not, so your best guess based on looking from the outside if they look like different structures/buildings or not would be fine.
from these, the node on the outline is not fine, it is a topology error. The node must be inside the building, on the outline it is neither in nor out, this is fine for the entrance but not for the shop.
I think adding the shop=* tags to the entrance=* node on the building outline is fine, data consumers should be able to handle that and translate it to whatever other form they like.
data consumers can decide to not believe the data and guess the POI is not on the perimeter, between inside and outside, but should instead be inside, and it could “work” if the node is only part of one building (i.e. it is not a door between 2 buildings), but it would still mean guesswork and drop the provided information, it is not a representation I would describe as equally correct, it is wrong.
