Proposal talk:Architect

Summary of discussion on mailing list

architect vs architects

There was some agreement that the key name should be singular, and no disagreement.

architect vs architect_name

There was agreement that there's no need to use architect_name, as it's unlikely that anyone would want to include any other information about the architect (eg architect_date_of_birth) as a tag on a building.

Tag vs relation

There was some discussion over whether architects should be mapped using tags on buildings or as a relation. The argument for using relations is that would connect all the buildings by a particular architect together, without having to make sure that everyone spelled the architect's name in exactly the same way. The argument against is that 'the buildings by x architect' can be seen as a category, and Relations are not Categories.

In the end, there was general consensus on using a key rather than a relation.

name uniqueness

How do you handle the situation when there are several architects with the same name? Currently, you could only search for "buildings by architects with name n", not for "buildings by architect a (the name of whom is/was n)". --Tordanik 13:13, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Good question. I'm not sure there's any easy solution though. Whilst using relations might resolve these ambiguities, it'd make tagging a lot harder. Especially as often all you know is the architect's name, and researching whether one architect is the same as another architect with the same name would be quite a burden. This isn't a very satisfactory answer, I know, but the same problem exists, for example if you want to do a query that finds all the cafes in the Starbucks chain - all you have to go on is the name, and so you have no way of knowing whether a cafe called "Starbucks" is part of the global chain, or just happens to have the same name. Thankfully, I suspect that in the real world, these types of ambiguities are fairly rare (especially as both architects and shop chains are pretty protective over their names as trademarks). Frankie Roberto 15:51, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Outside OpenStreetMap this is also a recurring problem, which is often solved by either adding the year of birth (eg, "Anne Hathaway (1555)") or the country of residence (eg, "Graham Greene (UK)"). See also how IMDB solves this with identical movie titles. --Pbb (talk) 19:51, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

Since this topic was started, another possible solution has shown up: Using architect:wikidata=* instead of or in addition to the plain architect=* key. Wikidata already provides unique identifiers instead of relying on names, and it also enables applications to pull in various biographical details about the architect, as well as images, Wikipedia links and so on. Perhaps the key should be mentioned on this page? --Tordanik 14:13, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

Nobody interested

It seems to me that nobody is interested in this tag, there are only 4 buildings with this tag up to now. Not even the requestor of this proposal has tried it...

--Lulu-Ann 17:01, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure where your number comes from. osmdoc lists 45, tagwatch also finds several in Europe. That's not a lot, but clearly more than 4. --Tordanik 19:17, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

See Query-to-map links. --Lulu-Ann 06:41, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi - I've held back from adding lots of tags until the proposal got approved (or rather, a general consensus emerged). I agree that few people are interested in it right now, however as most of the roads get mapped, and people move onto buildings more and more, I think 'architect' will emerge as one of the key attributes for a building. Frankie Roberto 14:46, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

On other structures

I just added an architect tag to a fountain. Seems like a logical application to me. Kay_D 16 September 2009

Nice :-)

Building attributes

This could be part of 'Building attributes' proposal: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Building_attributes --Platlas23 22:28, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Architect vs artist

There is a gray area between architects and artists (artist_name=*), especially if you start looking at things like fountains and bridges. We should have a clear description of how to distinguish these tags, or maybe consider using one tag for both.--Pbb (talk) 19:56, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

About likelihood

There was agreement that there's no need to use architect_name, as it's unlikely that anyone would want to include any other information about the architect (eg architect_date_of_birth) as a tag on a building.

Recently I cleaned up a few hundred architect=* tags (in area of Hungary). Several editors like to put biographical data into this field including but not limited to birth/death year, title, office, nickname, awards, position, degree, association membership, year of design, workplace or even a complete sentence from the Wikipedia. --Kogutowicz Manó (talk) 05:24, 15 February 2023 (UTC)