I’ve updated and added quite a lot of shops and businesses recently, and I don’t find this to be the case. If anything, perhaps the opposite. Nodes tend to be placed close to the street entrance so it’s usually clear just by looking at the map at your location if they have changed.
Out of dateness is a big problem for businesses, but I’ve seen it just as much on streets with good address tagging as shopping malls.
Again, that’s not something I’ve really noticed. And if it does happen occasionally, it’s not ideal to lose the node history, but in the context of the overall problem of keeping POIs updated, it seems a relatively minor issue.
This is clearly the better solution, especially since there could be multipole entrances. But it’s up to the geocoder, not the router, to decide whether to pick the center of the polygon, or search for an entrance. The latter being the cleaner solution.
Another disadvantage is for large buildings a routing issue. The destination for routing is always a “point” or “node” - When you tag stuff on a building its up to an algorithm to find the “right” node - Typically something like a Geometric Centroid of the buildings area. This node may be next to a completely different street than the one one would prefer to reach the business via.
this is also an advantage when the building or area is very big and can be accessed from several entrances. With a polygon, the entrances are automatically connected to the thing, while a node forces you to decide where to put it. A centroid is often not the best choice as routing target, but entrances (or gates) are usually the places where you want to go to enter the target area.
Something like this - The Housenumber 308 destination would now be routed to the road at the top where the Navigation will tell you “You have reaches your destination”.
if you’re going to a big commercial or industrial compound like in this example, you would usually know which entrance you should go to, e.g. “Tor 2” in this example, and in an ideal world you would either put this directly as the target, or the router would offer you several possibilities to choose from (after you asked for the housenumber 308).
Just chiming in to say that this response indicates to me that your heart is in the right place with respect to hearing out others’ opinions and embracing the spirit of collaboration. Thank you for leading with this perspective
I suppose you are correct that ideally a building and a business should be mapped as two separate objects.
I think it depends on the exact circumstances. As an example, a large local big box retailer operates a large building. Within it, and along the front foyer, are three small businesses that sublease space from them (car insurance, hair care salon, and a eye exam clinic). In the case of the eye clinic, that is now the only one left in our community, as the other long term provider moved 30 miles to a larger community. But the building is known by the name of the retailer, and the small businesses are orthagonal to the primary operator. In past decades there have been a small bank branch and a fast food operation, but they have gone elsewhere.
