At the last OSM meeting in Chiang Mai I presented my collection of JOSM presets to have a quick way to tag common shops, banks and petrol stations.
As there are other highly visible shops which can work as landmarks for navigating around town I considered it a good idea to have a closer look.
Car dealers often advertise themselves using huge signs I thought these might be a good candidate for more presets. Also the tagging scheme is quite established.
I was surprised that after manual cleanup of mistagged places there are only 204 named car dealers in Thailand. I would have expected much more.
Maybe it was just me considering them useful as a landmark and no one else is tagging them.
So I’m going to add presets for the most frequently observed brands of shop=car in Thailand.
These are the most frequent tagged brands
44 Toyota
33 Isuzu
24 Honda
16 Mitsubishi
15 Nissan
14 Ford
13 Mazda
10 Chevrolet
5 Suzuki
To install the presets in JOSM open “Preferences”, then select “Map Settings”. There you open the tab “Tagging Presets”.
Add the following location using the “plus” button. You will find the presets below the “Thailand” category.
Very nice. I like the additional details popup especially. I think there are several reasons not many car dealers are tagged. First off, speaking for the farang mappers, I think most of the us are not interested in car dealers because we are generally not car owners ourselves. And secondly, Thailand needs so much basic mapping, roads and towns, rivers, and reservoirs that, at least in my case, things like car dealers seem less important. I used to tag all 7-Elevens. Now, I tag them only in small out-of-the-way places. In cities like Chiang Mai you can find them on every street corner.
Back to the presets: it seems you forgot to add shop=car to the car dealer presets. They add only tags for brand=* and name=*
Dave, you’re absolutely right. How could I have missed that. I did so much double-checking to have all names right and have the logos come up…
It is fixed now.
As a side note: The presets do employ “tagging for the renderer” which should be avoided. As many mappers use the cartho-css style on osm.org to check their edits I add a name tag in addition to the correct brand tag. After the issue on the main style is resolved I consider a mass edit to remove the name tags duplicating the brand entry reasonable.
Issue is tracked here: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/698
Looks good to me. I’m wondering about the banks: many of the major banks now use their abbreviated names as the branding in most of their marketing material (e.g. the Facebook pages of SCB, KTB and KBank). Would these be a better choice for the brand tag than their rather unwieldy full names (which could be used to fill the operator field)?
Sounds plausible. As a brand is the “word” or sentence they use for the marketing of their service. I have some of these in the preset names, like SCB or BAAC.
What is your suggestion for *:th? For you as a native speaker: Is it considered useful? Would you expect to see Thai characters on a “Thai” map or the Latin characters?
Suggestions for the brand values for banks are welcome.
I’m not quite sure. I’d expect to see some Latin characters in a map aimed for the general Thai audience. For example, “เซเว่น อีเลฟเว่น” feels much clunkier than “7-Eleven”. But then if one is of the position that the *:th tags are meant to represent the Thai language to the greatest extent possible, (e.g. so that Thai-readers who don’t read Latin characters may use the map) it makes sense to follow that rule. The Thai Wikipedia, for example, does this.
Personally I feel that the default (non-language-specific) tags could serve as a compromise, employing Latin characters where most people would expect them, with Thai for the rest. But then actual application would also call for judgement, (what do “most people” actually think?) and may lead to inconsistencies. (“SCB” feels normal to me, but “BAAC” doesn’t—I’d expect to see “ธ.ก.ส.” instead. Do others feel the same way?)
For diesel: I never seen one of the brand-name stations which didn’t have it.
Does it make sense to add tagging for it? I ask for the more “exotic” fuel types as these might be harder to find.
JOSM checks every 7 days, for a more often update remove the cached copy from your users-directory.
Meanwhile a larger selection of branded POI has been added.
Krungsri was already there but using the long name of the bank: “Bank of Ayudhya”. As Krungsri is the brand they use I changed the preset accordingly.
Still waiting for some more opinions on how to tag the other banks. Use short names like BAAC, SCP, … for them instead of the long name?
Currently the main mapnik style uses name for labels, but is supposed to switch to “brand” for many categories. Follow 698 in the issue tracker for more details.
For fuel stations.
I have only seen them separate. Either liquid fuel or gas. So the presets only ask for type of CNG/LPG for these. For the liquid fuel it asks for specialties which might not be available at the specific station.
Is there a demand for having more fuel types?
Which ones? especially tagging of the gasoline/gasohol seems to be not yet established.
I’m not sure how useful this practice is but I currently use tags for both gasohols (91 and 95 octane), both gasolines or benzines (91 and 95 octane), diesel, E20 and E85. In cases where I cannot determine the octane rating from my drive-by photo I fall back to just fuel:gasohol=yes, and/or fuel:gasoline=yes.
Also, I came across a couple of name brand stations (PTT, Caltex) that are offering either CNG or LPG in addition to the normal fuel types. You might want to include checkboxes for those fuels as well.
This will requite a bit of work on your part and if you decide not to do it I’ll probably go ahead on my own but I think it would make a very useful addition to your Thai-centric Preset Group. We could achieve much better consistency with such a guide right in front of us in the preset.
I see that you have added Caltex in all uppercase in your presets, I don’t see a reason for it to be all uppercased.
I know their logo is all uppercased, but so is most logos. I find it more important how they do it when they talk about themselves, e.g. in letters, on websites and similar.
A quick look at their website reveals that they do not use all uppercase when they use their name: http://www.caltex.com
Not sure about the phone number as it’s a short dial. We should use international format phone numbers. Also I find a call center number a bit unsuitable.
Similar feelings about the website of the franchise. Does it really help if the actual promotion is depending whether your local restaurant participates?
Either way: The URL format has to include the protocol and trailing slash to be valid. Or use a protocol relative URL which might look weird, but is still valid.
I was thinking it would go well in Stephan’s collection so everyone could use it.