Hi,
does anyone have experience with the tags shop=groundskeeping and shop=garden_machinery?
On OSM wiki they have identical description and shop=garden_machinery is listed on the wiki shop=groundskeeping as tagging mistake.
So shouldn’t shop=garden_machinery be marked as deprecated?
Current taginfo usage:
shop=groundskeeping - 527
shop=garden_machinery - 91
While these are similar, they are not exactly the same, there are subtle differences, and we could discuss whether these merit a distinction on the first level or should be dealt with in a secondary tag. Groundskeeping shops typically cater to the broader maintenance of large outdoor spaces, such as parks, sports fields, golf courses, and public grounds. They may provide tools and equipment specifically used for maintaining turf, lawns, landscapes, and outdoor areas, e.g. ride-on mowers, line trimmers and equipment for irrigation, fertilization, or snow removal, whereas a garden machinery shop focuses more on the tools and equipment specifically designed for garden care, both for hobbyist gardeners and professionals, e.g. lawnmowers, hedge trimmers, chainsaws, leaf blowers, and other tools designed for gardening tasks such as digging and cultivating.
The groundskeeping shops tend to cater more for professional users in larger scale contest (parks, golf courses) while garden machinery shops are aiming at smaller scale gardeners.
So I agree to keep both tags and suggest adding description for these tags on wiki. shop=groundskeeping - for shops selling machinery for professionals and maintenance of larger areas (parks, golf courses ant other playgrounds, urban green spaces, etc.) shop=garden_machinery - shop focused on machinery for home gardening.
in reality, it is not as black and white, there is probably some overlap, and the garden machinery shops are not exclusively catering for home gardening, but may also sell professional grade equipment.
So shop=groundskeeping - only for shops selling machinery for professionals and maintenance of larger areas (parks, golf courses or grass pitches, urban green spaces, etc.) shop=garden_machinery - shop focused on machinery for home gardening, but can also sell products for professionals
(not a native speaker! I have no great experience with such shops! But having many shop values with miniscule usage is annoying to support, shops with subtags are generally more reasonable to handle)
What kind of items does it sell? If the name has “machinery” in it, I would expect power tools, lawnmowers, leaf blowers and the like, but not so much shovels, rakes or pruning shears while they would be expected in a garden equipment shop.
The common name also for hand tools could be shop=garden_tools.
The type of tools could be: garden_tools=groundskeeping - for shops selling tools for professionals and maintenance of larger areas (parks, golf courses or grass pitches, urban green spaces, etc.), garden_tools=garden_machinery - machinery for home gardening, garden_tools=hand_tools - shop selling only hand tools.
At the level of usage of these tag values, it’s probably a waste of time to discuss it. The reality is that there’s a huge overlap of shops that “somewhat” fit into these categories. Some will be country store type places (think wax jackets and horse gubbins), some will overlap with the more mechanical agrarian places (often small tractor service as well as sales) and some will overlap with garden centres (fancy a Koi Carp with your lawnmower?).
None of the shop=garden_machinery that I’ve encountered come close to groundskeeping or vice versa, but data consumers are free to process the data how they wish. Doing that is neither easier nor harder if the difference is in a main tag or a subtag,
Not exactly. If you are interested in full detail then having 100 000 top level values is the same as having 2000 top level values each with 50 sub variants.
But if you are interested in less than full detail then it much easier to deal with just main tag and process subtags partially or not at all.
With a data consumer hat on, that’s not my experience. Two examples spring to mind - agrarian and healthcare (and colon-separated versions of it).
With agrarian I have process lots of subtags with semicolons to get to the broad categories I want (animal feed based or mechanical based). with healthcare it’s arguable worse - there are many tags now needed to identify facilities).
But if you are interested in less than full detail then it much easier to deal with just main tag and process subtags partially or not at all.
if the first level distinction is sensible and meets your requirements/expectations. For example tourism=information is the kind of tag where this is often not the case, most people must look at the secondary tag to see if and how they display it, you will usually want to distinguish a guidepost from an information office from a map.
I see that there is no match on the top tag.
So I propose to keep the structure as f. e. tag furniture. There is shop=furniture, shop=kitchen, shop=bathroom_furnishing, shop=bed and shop=garden_furniture.
So I propose to keep the already established tags shop=groundskeeping and shop=garden_machinery, with the fact that their description on the wiki will be clarified as I mentioned above.
A shop with only hand tools could be classified under the already established, albeit general tag shop=tools.
It will always be a problem for the mapper to distinguish whether the dealer sells more to private end customers or to, for example, municipal customers. If that is the only difference between the two shops, the one supported by renderers will continue to develop. Osmand, for example, supports shop=groundskeeping.