personally, for me, I initially though that shop=plant_hire would be place recruiting workers for factory and I keep being confused by the name - but maybe shop=heavy_equipment_rental is not much better for others or misleading in some way?
would inventing new tag value be a good idea, despite “plant hire” being actual UK term?
My first thought when reading “Plant hire” is that it is a place where you can rent organisms from the Plantae kingdom, for instance for temporary event decoration. So it is confusing.
A bulldozer is a kind of tool, isn’t it? By putting it under shop=tool_hireit’s clear it’s a kind of tool you can hire there and not decorative plants or plant workers.
shop=plant_hire is a very poor tag indeed as plant is one of those catch all terms starting from botanic plants moving over all kind of machinery and equipment up to complete production facilities like a steel plant. Couldn’t be much worse.
The same applies to rental=plant which is described in the wiki as
for shops that rent plants e.g. for corporate events
What does “for corporate events” mean? Any equipment for the corporate anniversary party like a
bouncy castle or a complete stage for musical performance? I have no idea what this tag stands for.
Instead of plant I would prefer to use more specific descriptions like construction_equipment/machinery, farming_equipment/machinery, escalators, production_machinery or the like. But whatever is chosen, the rental tagging remains a mess anyhow, being a mixture of
amenity=*_rental
shop=rental + rental=*
office=rental + rental=*
*_rental=yes/no
Btw. although one of the meanings of plant is equipment or machinery, at least in construction business it is much more common to talk about construction_equiment or construction_machinery instead of plant.
No, that is not what that means in English. It is nothing to do with aspidistras and it is nothing to do with renting a factory or production facility.
I’ve just tried a web search for “plant hire” (in a browser in England) and the results were for companies renting machinery (“plant”), either with and without operators. The search engine understood that, and the people who bought those search words understood that too.
Someone tagging a local business will understand that too (with a local example it is literally part of the name).
Please let’s not try and overthink OSM tagging, especially in the “long tail” of values. Go out and map something new instead.
But let’s have in mind that Bad English™ is the world’s lingua franca, and that non-native speakers will have a hard time understanding and searching for that term. I use English a lot in everyday communication, mainly of technical nature, and consider myself an advanced L2 speaker, but I’ve never heard of or used that particular meaning of plant (I know of e.g. a manufacturing plant, but had no clue that the word also applies to bulldozers et al.).
… and of course it absolutely makes sense to ensure that translations in e.g. OSM editors help people to find things when they’re searching in Italian. Arguably new OSM mappers shouldn’t need to know any OSM tags, they should be able to search concepts in iD as they edit stuff.
For better or worse, many things in OSM use tags that are British English words. I’m on record as saying that it’s a shame that we’re not using German for OSM tagging, but we are where we are.
Edit: And its unrelated to this tagging question, but some of the “why X is a good tag” here is still relevant.
I’m sure you are right and don’t want to overthink the meaning of shop=plant_hire or rental=plant but that is not common day to day english. In my 20 years work for an international construction company I have never heard anyone calling the heavy construction equipment ‘plant’.
Besides that there are definitely shops renting out botanic plants to offices, events (probably that is the meaning of “plant for corporate events”?!?) etc., like it or not.
So even is rental=plant may be correct english it could be worth thinking about a tag which will
be easier understood by non-experts
not be as easily confusable as the actual one is
without putting the use of english as basic language for OSM in question.
/pedant obviously not, because the plural of “plant” (as in something botanic) is “plants”, unlike “plant” (singular and plural for heavy machinery)
I completely understand that people unfamiliar with the native use of the English language will think that some terms are confusing (and sometimes they are - it absolutely makes sense to use the American word “sidewalk” in place of the English word “pavement” in OSM), but it really isn’t worth fretting that every tag, especially rare ones, is understandable by people only at English As She Is Spoke level - OSM editors should be handling the “concept to tag” translation.
My only question is why do we have shop=plant_hire but amenity=car_rental? Should have been shop=motor_hire and then the OSM tag would align with SomeoneElse’s search results :)
And why do we have dozens of “rental” tags for these things?
So far the theory. The reality says there is exactly 1 use of rental=plant which has been assigned to a company “Giardino Verde Pflanzen & Event AG” hiring plants for company events.
