taxonomy guidance

Something that is driving me a bit bonkers, is which taxonomy do you use for something that is primarily B2B (business-to-business). Is it /craft/ or is it /shop/ ?

A few examples …

A personal acquaintance has a business that specializes in rebuilding automotive (and truck presumably) superchargers. This is very specialized, and I know it. Even if I can’t find a previous tag or keyword, where is the logical place to put it ? I’m reasonably sure that 99% plus of his business is done via freight packages, so he has no store-front to speak of. It really doesn’t feel like a shop to me. Having said that …

There are various businesses in my area that deal with agricultural machinery. Mostly for farm activities, but we do quite a bit of forestry & logging here, and there are those flavor of dealers also. Searching tag values under /shop/ for /machine/ yields a number of likely variants in use. This takes me back full circle that /shop/ is not necessarily for B2C (business-to-consumer), or perhaps it has been misused a bit.

I also tried to find something to represent a business that primarily rents power tools (everything from a hand drill up to self-powered lifts). There are several of these I can think of, but no obvious tag value. IIRC, I was creative and went with /shop=tool_rental/. Maybe this is more common around here, but I think these type of businesses exist in many areas. While this business does mostly B2B, I’m sure there is B2C walk-in as well.

There is another business that builds boats. Not so much the classic wooden boat type of facility, but they build plenty of pontoon boats, houseboats, floating docks, and specialty items. I have tagged them as /craft=boatbuilder/. I’m not sure if what they do is really so much a craft, as boat engineering and assembly. Mostly they use aluminum for the hulls.

OK, rant off.

With a free tagging system, you are always going to have problems like this. Also, many independents in London don’t cleanly fit into just one category. However there are 43 uses of shop=tool_hire, so I would go with that one. (Some other people seem to use shop=doityourself for these, but I don’t like that)

I would not consider your boat builder or engine repairer to be shops.

There has also almost certainly been a strong bias towards mapping features used by the general public, so I don’t think that much thought has gone into B2B sales.

The boat builder could be man_made=works, but taginfo has just run out of disk space so I can’t check how popular this is.

The tool_hire is an excellent solution. For linguistic reasons, I never thought to look for /hire/.

/man_made=works/ is used ~5%. The page for /works/ leaves me a bit unsure, and suggests that works are larger operations. Maybe size is not the issue here. Changing it from /craft=boatbuilder/ to /man_made=works/ ends up conveying less specific information, so I am less happy about that movement. /works/ seems to be a catchall for any large industrial operation.