Talk:Key:building

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Discussion to date moved to 'talk:buildings'

See also: talk:buildings

I have moved the discussions about building tagging from this page to the new Buildings article in talk:buildings. I have done this because it seems appropriate to have the earlier discussions about tagging in the place that is likely to attract further discussion to avoid duplication or contradiction. PeterIto 06:49, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Scope

The buildings key currently seemss to be trying to perform a range of contradictory roles. It is mainly about building use: ie retail, hotel, garage, but then has entries for building status: ie 'collapsed', and also the construction material: ie 'panel house'. In addition there is the suggestion that one uses building=yes and building:type=* for the function. As such it isn't possibly to define a ruined hotel which is constructed using a 'panel-house' technique.

Can I suggest that:

  1. Confirm that this tag should be used for the purpose of the building,
  2. Agree on a recommend way of tagging the construction method, ie panel house etc, and also possibly if it has a flat or pitched roof etc.
  3. Encourage the use of more standard life-cycle tagging for ruined buildings.
  4. Create a number of 'catch-all' type for situation where something is known about the use, but not everything. For example 'Education', for any sort of educational establishment, particularly one for which a more specific tag is not available, and 'place_of_worship' for any form of religious building.
  5. Clarify that we should be tagging the 'main purpose' of the building, so a shop with a flat above would be tagged as a shop. Possibly we need 'mixed' for where there it is too complex for any of the agreed tagging.

Any thoughts?

-- PeterIto 11:55, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

From what I've read on the mailing lists and this wiki and on the IRC channel, the rough consensus has been that building is best used for "typology", i.e. physical nature of the building - a "house" might be used as an office, but it looks like a house (even if they come in very different but similar shapes), an old church looks like a church even if it now only has a nightclub inside. As you noticed, this has been been to date more of a "tag anything", so I took the top 15 values and removed entrance and yes to see what the majority is:
value count (2012-02-08) percentage of these typology/use?
house 469074 26% typology
hut 340728 19% typology
residential 296618 17% use
garage 155603 9% typology
apartments 111597 6% typology
roof 109595 6% typology
garages 72767 4% typology
industrial 65307 4% use
farm_auxiliary 25488 1%
service 19405 1%
detached 18032 1% typology
church 15417 1% typology
school 14362 1% typology
manufacture 13528 1% use
terrace 11322 1% typology
collapsed 10708 1% state
hangar 10666 1% typology
cabin 10153 1% typology
retail 8928 1% use/typology
Totals of these of all except yes
typology 75% 70%
use 24% 22%
could-be-either/unknown 4% 10%
Remaining values total to 138416 atm (and =yes is at over 49 million). I do agree that dealing with some little used variants (as you listed) is a challenge, especially how to instruct the next mapper who comes across a building=panel_house to move that to, say, building:structure=large_panel_system if they choose to change the building value. (fwiw, now that I read about it on wp, just about all blocks of flats built here since the 1960's, and even today, are these, even if they might look just like masonry buildings). The questions that remain unasked for classifying buildings are probably the ones that give us the majority of unorthodox values: is a university building with mostly paid researchers' rooms a building=office? Alv 12:55, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for such a fast and comprehensive response. Based on my analysis which is more angled at building 'use' that 'typology' a number of places seem to be using the 'use' system. I also believe that the terms garage, garages, apartments and house (the most common on your list) are just as likely to be being used for use rather than typology. Personally I would be reluctant to tag a solicitors office as 'house' even if it occupied a building that was originally built as a rather grand house, particularly if I was to then need to tag the solicitors next door based in a 1960s office as 'office'. I think other people would also get that wrong a lot of the time. Anyway... here are the values I have seen is use around the place grouped a rough sort of way:
  • Civic: amenity, city_hall, courthouse, church, civic, gymnasium, hall, museum, place_of_worship, prison, pub, public_building, railway_station, service, shelter, station, toilets, tourism, train_station, veterinary
  • Commercial: Commercial (except with shop=*), industrial, office, warehouse, unit
  • Education: College, kindergarten, school, university
  • Health: hospital, pharmacy, nursing_home, healthcare
  • Residential: Apartments, dormitory, detached, flats, house, residential, semi, terrace
  • Retail: Mall, shop, retail, store, supermarket,
This conversation seems to have stalled and I note that the subject has also been raised on talk:Buildings. Another though... if we are using this key for typology then how should one interpret some of the most common values? Even in the UK the term 'house' might mean a mansion, a large Victorian villa, or a small cottage and when one goes global and considers the most impoverished and richest places in the world then it seems very unsatisfactory. If however one uses the word 'house' to mean a construction in which a group of people live sharing facilities then that is immediately understandable. Similarly with garages, which can be constructed in many different ways using many different materials, some of which are indistinguishable from a shed. One can however normally establish if it is designed for the storage of a vehicle from the approach. The same sort of comments could be made about 'church', 'school' and 'office'. PeterIto 21:14, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
"how should one interpret some of the most common values? Even in the UK the term 'house' might mean a ..." In my opinion building=house can be interpreted only as a synonym of building=yes. But this problem is unsolvable.
- Zkir 22:13, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi again :) In my opinion typology is better. Here are the reasoning (same as at [Talk:Buildings], just for convenience here). 1. As I know, by many people in many countries the value of the building tag was understood as building typology. For example, in Russia 'church' is a very distinct kind of architecture. However, many churches are still either abandoned or used as museums or warehouses etc. Same situation with garages, building=garages commonly assumes something like this [1], but not necessary cars are kept there, and so on. 2. It's not quite good to change meaning of existing tags, because it makes impossible to interpret map data. 3. Current function of the building should be (and is) indicated by tags like shop and amenity. No need to duplicate it in the building tag.

My suggestion is to change the definition back to "building typology", or, may be, to "intended (or original) function", adding note that there are some exceptions (which is true). - Zkir 22:13, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

+1 for the typology. A railway_station still looks like a railway_station even if it is now used as house. A church, even in a modern shape, is a kind of building, even if it is used today as a library (building=church + amenity=library). --FrViPofm 22:57, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Use/typology and lifecycle

The main key building=* should contain the type (typology), I agree that life-cycle and construction technology should be tagged separately (together with current use). --LM 1 00:45, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Would it be a reasonable compromise to say that where a building is current being used for the same purpose for which it was built it can simply be tagged with the current use? For example, a building that was built as a hotel, and is also currently an operational hotel should just be tagged as building=hotel. By way of contrast, a big residential house that has since been converted to a hotel (as so many have been in central London) should be tagged as 'building=house;building:use=hotel'. However... I think it will sometimes be a tall order to expect people to dig into the former uses where the building has been extensively altered, and we may have to tolerate it just being tagged with its current use for starters, ie building=hotel until someone spots the former use and corrects it. By way of example, it was only after passing this former railway station[2] over 50 times that I finally noticed that it looked like a minor rural station on a long abandoned railway line. Checking on OSM later I confirmed that it was on the route. As such I might have initially tagged it 'building=house', and then converted it to building=train_station;building:use=house' at a later date.
For the avoidance of doubt, we would recommend the same tags for building and building:use? I see that there is a suggestion that one should just use 'tags like shop and amenity' to describe the use, however I would suggest that there should only be one amenity=school or amenity=hospital attached to the landuse, not to each individual building.
-- PeterIto 20:14, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
I agree that some building types imply a specific use (and this use can be assumed unless explicitly marked). Your example with hotel and railway station seems fine to me, but I am not sure about same tags for building type and building use. building:use of a house (or apartments complex) would be residential. If the building is extensively altered, it is possible that is is not what it was anymore, so building=* could also change during time. --LM 1 09:44, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
Good, and I agree that the (implied) use for a house should be 'residential' not 'house'! It is also my preference to tag for current appearance of the building rather than the original use when it has extensively altered. For the avoidance of doubt, are you happy with the changes I have made to the building template over the past few days. Personally I am pretty happy with it now, but have had limited feedback (positive or negative) from others. PeterIto 10:06, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
<-----

I did not specifically look what was already there and what you changed, but generally, there is nothing really wrong, just a few details and missing types:

would deserve a separate value.

I know that all the types I just mentioned are not so numerous, but they are usually more important than residential buildings...

--LM 1 00:03, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for coming back on this. Very reassuring to be discussing this properly. In response to the above.
  • I have added 'relation' to the type options. I would however observe that even landuse=* doesn't show relation as legal type!
  • Regarding commercial, I am not clear that there is benefit from having both office and commercial given that commercial is only really for offices ((industrial and retail have their own tag value). We might however want to think about different typologies of commercial building (as we do with residential in terrace,apartments etc)
  • Let's not duplicate other tags. For example: I have converted building=hangar into a redirect to aeroway=hangar. I wonder if bunker belongs here as well as in military?
  • I have removed farm. I had been wanting to do that for some time, but didn't want to have too many discussions going simultaneously so left it for starters!
  • Mixed is probably a necessary addition, although I think that might be work a bit of discussion first about how it should be used. See next comment.
  • You then start a useful discussion about possible additional entries for significant additional typologies. I would very much support that as long as we don't duplicate entries in other tags (such as man_made, historic etc). I am going to copy your list above to a new section at the bottom of the talk page with a heading of 'possible addition values' where we can discuss them one by one!

-- PeterIto 04:21, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

  • It is the same case, in both it is not any relation, but only multipolygon. Maybe multipolygon relations are (should be) treated as areas?
  • You can generally distinguish apartment buildings and any other residential from any commercial, but can you always tell offices apart form industrial, sometimes there are even mixed, for this I would use commercial (don't know/mixed). And maybe commercial should be avoided altogether, since it is more use than type.
  • As I see it, aeroway=hangar and military=bunker should only be used if there are planes or soldiers inside. Disused bunkers that cannot be used for defence are not military anymore, same for hangars. But the building clearly remains a bunker.

--LM 1 09:09, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Current tag values

I have done an analysis of values currently in building around the world. There are pockets around the world where there is reasonably high usage of the tag and many other areas where nearly all buildings are 'yes'. Clearly the tagging is a bit of a mess at present, but I hope this will help us pull something useful going forward. Personally I think we are actually going to end up with some tagging which gives a clue to both typology and to use and over tag values that imply only typology. I have split the current values up into very broad categories and will comment on each in turn. PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Residential accommodation (see education for halls of residence etc)

In general, the most useful (excluding specialist places like convents, palaces prisons for now!) seem to be "apartments, bungalow, detached_house, semi-detached_house (for one or a pair of connected houses), terrace (for a single unit in a row) and residential (for a unspecified arrangement of connected dwellings). I would suggest that the fact that it is sheltered housing should be covered by secondary tagging and also the fact that it is run by the council. Regarding student accommodation, dormitory (see building=dormitory seems to be likely to create problems for us as it has different meanings in the UK and USA and the currently uses the USA one (and OSM usually is based on British Engilish). Can we recommend 'hall_of_residence' as for preference? PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Retail

It does seem to be useful to distinguish a row of shops on the high-street with accommodation above from an out-of-town warehouse or a shopping centre. The wiki page recommends 'retail' for all shops except 'supermarket', but then indicates that supermarket can be used for a shopping Mall? Do we want to distinguish building types at all here, ie a distinction beteen hight-street and the 'warehouse' style? PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Education

Should we use 'school' for all levels of education and then use Proposed features/ISCED. PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Medical

Any comments? PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Farming

Comments? I don't think tiny_barn is useful, possibly hut or shed? Should a farm-house be tagged as 'house'? PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

A bunch of smaller building types

Comments? PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Offices and commercial (ie, people sitting at desks)

We have a office=* and I believe we should use virtually all of these office with an appropriate associated tag. PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Industrial (people making stuff and moving stuff around)

Thoughts? Would it be useful to shrink this down to 'industrial' (except for gasometer and storage_tank) which should be 'man_made' and not be buildings at all? Should we create a industrial=* tag to indicate what sort of industry happens there? PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Transportation

Should we standardise on 'airport_terminal, train_station' and 'bus_depot'. Haven't found any 'transportation' examples yet - is this useful? PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

All sorts of civil amenities

Gallery as in 'art gallery' btw. Clear there could be some rationalisation here, but how much? PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Purely typology

This provide no information about usage. Is that good? PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

I disagree. building=bridge says a lot about the buildings usage ^^--Shmias 15:46, 27 March 2012 (BST)
Life cycle

These ones describe the status of the building, but not what it was or will be. PeterIto 18:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Adjustments

I have made a number of adjustments to this article. In particular I have:

Questions:

Any comments?

--PeterIto 07:43, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

At this time three things come to mind:
  • There was a start at a gallery of building types for tagging guidance at Key:building/Gallery and IIRC it was linked to from somewhere more prominent.
  • Thanks. I would however suggest that we rely on suitable photos in the table on this page and then have an individual page for value if more information is required. PeterIto 17:39, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Around here people have generally tagged terraced buildings as one building=* way, with the entrances then with extra (letter) ref's for doors. Generally, the whole building is considered to have the same addr:housenumber, as opposed to each dwelling having a distinct house number. And in fact it's often several row houses on the same plot that share the same housenumber, since they are part of the same housing co-op. Also the exact division can be real hard to survey, when they're built as one building. But I can totally see how it's different for the individual one home buildings built wall-to-wall. But maybe we were ahead of times when we used building=terraced for the whole building ways? :) It's the same with duplex's, although we've encountered a duplex with the tenants garages between the homes, where it would definitively make sense to use a different tag stating "part of a duplex but this way depicts one home". One could look at the 1400 uses of 'semi-detached' and 200 uses of 'duplex' to try to see if they are to date entered as adjoining dwellings or whole buildings. I could have a go at it after about two weeks, but hope somebody beats me to it. Alv 09:23, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
  • In the UK each house in a terrace has a different number, and it is normally possible to see the boundaries between each house based on the position of boundaries between gardens. PeterIto 17:39, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Also.. here is a new ITO Map layer which allows one to more easily see how people are using the different tags. In general 'terrace' seems to be used for the whole row, apartments as one might expect with other values used for individual houses. Overall however, the great majority of buildings are still tagged as building=yes. PeterIto 22:36, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
  • The value service seems to have quite a lot of uses, given it doesn't have any definition/guidance - are some of them the same as building=utility, as depicted on the gallery I linked to above? Alv 09:23, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Can I suggest that we define suitable more specific values and then deprecate service and convert them to garage/warehouse/shed/hut or whatever as required. PeterIto 17:39, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
  • My impression on further investigation is that service is used for civic buildings rather than the sheds etc as I first assumed - ie, it is a service to the community, rather than a service to a dwelling. As you can see below, I have added 'civil' to the table to cover this public service, and removed service given that its definition wasn't clear and it wasn't a very good term anyway. PeterIto 22:36, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Some comments in line above. Also.. I get the general impression that building tagging is reasonably in its infancy which is just fine, but let's spend a bit of time adding some of the 'missing' values to the table and answering more of the above questions. In particular, if terrace is used for the whole row of houses, then I think we will need a new entry for 'terraced_house' or something to use when tagging each dwelling unit separately; similarly for each half of a semi-detached where which should have a distinct value from the one describing the pair together. Not sure that 'terraced' is value though, given how similar it is to 'terrace'. Could lead to a lot of confusion. PeterIto 17:39, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

English planning law uses this classification system for building use: Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) Order 1987. I realise that we are tagging building typology rather than use as such, however good tags will probably say something useful about both typology and use. PeterIto 05:59, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
I have now made further adjustments to the building table implementing many of the above proposals. In particular, I have clarified the use of house, terrace and residential and created an entry for 'civic' to cover a range of civic functions (libraries, community centres etc). I have removed entries for collapsed, manufacture, public, service, supermarket and storage_tank and. PeterIto 15:52, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
I have adjusted the definition of building=commercial to fit more clearly with current usage of landuse=commercial and proposed that it is used with the office=* tag. Note however that landuse=commercial is not well defined but in usage seems to be reasonably well aligned to wikipedia:Commercial district. I have now removed 'building=office' (which I had introduced recently). PeterIto 06:30, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Duplicating landuse values

This seems to be duplicating the landuse values, leading to a bunch of redundancy when a building and its surrounding lot are both mapped. --NE2 03:07, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

The values may be same, but I don't think it is redundant because they the building and landuse/amenity ways are tagging different areas? For example... the tag 'building=school' is be used on the ways identifying the school building(s) themselves, and the 'amenity=school' is used for the school grounds that contains the buildings + parking fields etc; similarly for hotels, hospitals and train stations. Or have I missed your point? PeterIto 06:42, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
Your example is redundant - a building in an amenity=school landuse is by default a school. If there's a non-school building on school property, you can tag that as an exception, just like a small park in a residential neighborhood. --NE2 15:15, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
I see what you mean, however I suspect that many people will choose to tag a school building within a landuse of 'school' as building=school rather than building=yes if only for tidiness. I doesn't result on an additional tag after all. PeterIto 18:39, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
The other problem is that the tags need to be coordinated. If landuse=x means something different from building=x (due to changes in tags or whatever) we have a problem. I can't think of any reason we'd want different values of the two tags. So one possibility would be to keep the building=* tag for type of building only, and use landuse=* on the building for the use of the building. (This would of course be easier if all the landuses were in fact in landuse=*...) --NE2 23:26, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
I agree that some landuse tags are in a muddle, however I suggest that we focus on getting a clearer set of agreed values for building first and then worry about any landuse issues. I do however note that seem to have reasonably conformance on tag values, building=school, amenity=school; building=hospital, amenity=hospital etc. PeterIto 17:57, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
Maybe I'm not being clear? When we talk about building use, that's the same general idea as land use. So the same set of values should be able to describe both. --NE2 22:59, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
OK, I see and I do agree that we should align them where appropriate. We do now have building values of 'residential, retail, commercial, industrial' which follow the landuse tags closely. However, it doesn't follow that every building in an industrial area will be 'industrial' etc as there may be offices and warehouses and possibly also the odd house. We should also be aware that there is an intention to provide information about typology of the building within this tag, as such we should consider adding entries for 'multi-story-car-park, fill-station canopy etc which provide more information about structure; I would like to now explore adding a good number of these to this list. Also... some landuse values are not suitable for building values, such as 'orchard' or 'railway' for which 'shed', 'warehouse' and 'industrial' are probably better. PeterIto 08:58, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Apartments, house, residential and terrace

I have been investigating how residential properties are actually used using this new map layer on ITO Map. Given that we should be aiming for simplicity, can I suggest that we update the key:buildings table as follows. I am starting with the most specific, and progressing to the most general. For each of these we should create a wiki page where the details and special cases can be discussed. I am working on the basis that any down-stream software that wishes to determine if a house is 'detached', 'semi-detached' or 'terraced' will be expected to determine that from the connections between the various 'houses' and that we do not need to provide more detailed tags to distinguish these.

  1. House: A single dwelling unit with an independent external access inhabited by a small group of people sharing facilities; for example a family home, or a house shared by a small group of people; a single house will normally have a single shared kitchen. It may be attached to other other dwelling units (for example as part of a pair of semi-detached houses or as one in a row of terraced houses).
  2. Terrace: A building which consists of a number of distinct dwelling houses arranged in a row, each with their own entrance. A terrace can also be mapped individually using 'house' which each dwelling in the row sharing two or more nodes with each of its neighbours (A pair of semi-detached can normally be defined as two separate houses with a share pair of nodes rather than as a terrace).
  3. Apartments: A building arranged into individual dwellings, often on separate floors. It might be useful to have a way of indicating both how many units there are, and the valid addresses within the building. In addition information about any retail or commercial space integrated into the structure.
  4. Residential: The most general term, covering any of the above. Where detailed information is available one of the above will nearly always be more appropriate.
  5. Hall or residence: Accommodation provided for university or college students or similar.

Any comments?

-- PeterIto 11:58, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

I have now adjusted the table as per the above proposals. See 'Adjustments' section above for more details. PeterIto 16:05, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Cabins, huts and sheds

Continuing a review of these building value tags, I have been trying to make sense of how the values of 'cabin', 'hut' and 'shed' are being used in OSM. 'hut' is the only value in the buildings tag table, however cabin and shed are also reasonably well used in practice. It seems that all of these are being used in different places for the same function (mainly in Germany/Italy). I have created a new ITO Map view Cabins, huts and sheds to see how they are being used. Here are the main areas where the terms are used:

Personally, I would suggest that we add cabin and shed to the buildings table and define them as they are described in Wikipedia, which is:

Any thoughts? Needless to say, we would need to do some cleanup of the existing use of the terms in the above places. -- PeterIto 23:03, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

I have now added cabin and shed and adjusted the description for hut as per the above suggestion. PeterIto 07:00, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Possibly additional values

The following suggestions for additional entries has been made above and copied here for more detailed individual discussion: PeterIto 04:37, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Arenas

For example Colosseum and Bird's nest.

I agree, but possibly we need a number of values for different typologies. Not sure what you mean by the examples. Do you mean the Colosseum in Rome or elsewhere? PeterIto 04:37, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
I mean Colosseum in Rome, any other amphitheatre elsewhere and by Bird's nest the one in China. Maybe the antique ones deserve a different tag than the modern ones, but they are quite the same type. --LM 1 10:35, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Exhibition building

Not sure if this is used in English; place where exhibitions take place.

There are probably a range of these and possibly conference_centre would be better. I do however agree that something would be useful. PeterIto 04:37, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
What I mean is not conference, even if that might also be a specific building type. I meant this or this. It is usually only on exhibition grounds. Some are simple warehouses, some are more interesting. --LM 1 10:35, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Fuel-stations

The part that is not roof - retail?

I would suggest that a fuel-station canopy should be tagged with 'fuel-canopy' or something which provides more information about use and typology than 'roof' does not. The shop bit should probably be defined using retail with a shop tag given that these places are normally also more general types of shop. PeterIto 04:37, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
I have converted this section to British English and tweeked my response for clarity. PeterIto 12:37, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Gazebo/pavilion

Could be useful and might replace 'roof' which doesn't convey any information about the use of the building. Lets ensure that the value conveys something about the particular use of the structure, ie implied availability to the public or not. PeterIto 04:37, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Besides gas stations I have not seen anything that would be a roof only, even these pavilions have some (low) walls around. Leaving that aside, I see no problem in the tag describing only typology and not use. --LM 1 10:35, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
In principle does it make sense to look for names that provide information about both typology and use and use typology only in those situations where we fail?
I would prefer to have these two mapped separately (what is left if all the people leave), but majority of building types imply what they are used for (which I do not mind). This is mostly because I find it easier to work with it (map and use) if only one fact is mapped within one tag... --LM 1 13:34, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Historic buildings

Ones that are likely to last longer than most of contemporary buildings: pyramids, castles (de:Burg), Châteaux (de:Schloss)/palace.

Are some of these not already covered in historic=*? PeterIto 04:37, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
They seem to be. In fact a castle is more a complex of building than a single one, but I am not confident enough in castle typology and even less in English names for it, so I cannot add anything more. --LM 1 10:35, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
I am going to leave that for others to suggest values as it isn't something that particularly concerns me. In principle however I think we should have values for them and that they should ideally tie into historical uses/designs. Possibly 'keep' or defensive wall' etc. Need to avoid duplication of other tags though. PeterIto 12:37, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Mixed offices, apartments and retail

For sure, although it might be useful to distinguish a set of apartments with some retail on the ground floor from a highstreet shop with a big shop and a single small apartment above.

Sure, I do not have any sensible scheme at hand, but will think about it. --LM 1 10:35, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Towers

Do you mean communications towers or sky-scrapers or communications towers (which are covered by man_made=tower already? PeterIto 04:37, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Sky-scrapers would mostly fall into mixed or offices. I mean towers like the Clock tower (Big Ben), Žižkov TV tower or Rheinturm they can be used for communication, but have other uses (restaurants, viewpoints...). I am not sere it they are covered by man_made=tower, all mapped as (multiple) building=yes, some have man_made tower added. Mappers clearly see these structures as buildings more than towers so we should have building=tower. (Leaving man_made=tower for ones that do not qualify as a building. I would not be sure about Eiffel tower (currently both building=yes and man_made=tower). --LM 1 10:35, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
Probably best to avoid reuse of the term 'tower', however a useful distinction is that if people work or live in the structure then it is almost certainly a building, if not then it is probably a structure? Are we talking more about 'turret', ie a vertical structure coming out of the roof or from the walls? We are however possibly getting into Google Sketchup land, and incidentially I see no licensing reason why people can't describe buildings in 3D using sketchup and link them into OSM. We might need to create our own warehouse to avoid fall foul of their 'anti-scraping' policies, but if we need 3D then that is a great tool. PeterIto 12:37, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
I have been thinking about SketchUp already. Some of the models were even contributed by volunteers, who might agree to give them to OSM too. But that is way more detailed than distinctive mapping of very high buildings (towers).
In all the towers (except for BigBen) I mentioned, there are restaurants on the top, so it would fall within your definition of a buildig, Eiffel tower is probably not a building, but "only" a structure. My distinction of tower(building) v. tower(structure) would probably be the existence of enclosed space that can accommodate people (wider than yours, they neither have to work nor live there, they have to be able to be inside of it). Most of lighthouses would fall within this definition (unless they have a separate category): building example; structure only example.
I would not insist on the word tower, but I do not know about any other one that describes this kind of buildings and it is used in this meaning already --LM 1 13:20, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

onRelation?

As far as I can tell, the building key is not used for relations other than multipolygons (which are areas), so suggest to remove the onRelation=yes. Or can anyone offer examples for other established relations with building tags? --Tordanik 14:14, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

You are of course correct with that. It can be used on a relation, but only the multipolygon relation which seems to be treated in a different way (as an honorary way?). I will remove the onRelation=yes. See above for our discussion about its use with relations. PeterIto 14:27, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
Retrieved from "http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Key:building"
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