MapFactor Forum

Hi,

shops which are tagged as shop=mall cannot be found if you search for shopping centers. They can only be found if you look for shops. Currently only shop=department_store is taken into account as it seems.

As it is very much depending on the mapping quality* it may be more reasonable to have one common category "Shop" only but different icons for department_store and mall on one side and all other shops on the other side. At the moment both have a purple shopping trolley, so my recommendation is to at least have a different color for the shopping centers in the list of results. Even better may be to have three different icons:

• the current trolley for super_market
• a shopping bag within a house symbol for mall and department_store
• a shopping bag for all other shop types

This would help on searching and on the map as well. I don´t know whether the shop type is still part of the map data. Probably not. So a third type would possibly add more data to the maps if it´s a boolean information currently.

By the way, there are two types of restaurant in the search form. Both are called "Restaurant" and the only difference is the color of the icon. What is the difference behind? So far I have never found results for the orange version but only for the black one. If there is no difference, please remove the orange item. Otherwise please give it a different name which declares what it is.

Edit:
*) Even many of the shops which are tagged as department stores are actually no shopping centers but just shops which have everything and nothing. Many of them are even not very big which is actually part of the "department_store" definition. The issue is that shop=general is not very common in other countries than GB and USA (according to its wiki), so in the absence of better tags many users seem to take "department_store" because it´s the best you can find (apart from "general"). But when I am in a city which I don´t know it could be annoying if you really look for a shopping center and find a little shop only. So maybe only "mall" should have the shopping center flag in MFN and get an extra icon for the list and for the map.