WikiProject Belgium/Conventions/Buildings

WikiProject Belgium +/-
Activities Websites using OSM in Belgium Municipalities and special accounts
Conventions Boundaries Buildings Bus and tram lines Bus stops Cycle routes Cycleways EU institutions and bodies Highways Places Railways Road signs Schools Signs in nature reserves Slow roads Street names Walking routes
Subprojects Building and address import Open streetlevel imagery Cycle routes Land-use mapping Motorways Municipality Fusions Public transport Railways Road completion Sport in Vlaanderen (in Dutch) Walking routes Waterways Resolving notes

Tracing buildings

Buildings in Belgium should never be traced on aerial imagery. The 3 Belgian Regions provide a basemap showing the accurate basemap of buildings. Those basemaps should be used to trace buildings. They are available out of the box in JOSM and iD.

• In Flanders, this is Digitaal Vlaanderen GRB
• In Brussels: this is URBIS numerical imagery (aka UrbIS-Vector)
• In Wallonia: this is PICC numerical imagery

The only cases where tracing from aerial imagery is acceptable is when official data is outdated (old shapes or missing buildings). In that case, you may use aerial imagery but please use the correct techniques to guess the outline, and add a fixme=* tag explaining the situation. That way, other mappers can identify all buildings having a fixme=* tag in a given area after a new basemap is released and fix those buildings.

See WikiProject Belgium/Building and address import about the ongoing effort to import official data instead of having to trace each building manually.

Addresses

There are currently two ways of tagging addresses on buildings.

• Either on the building outline itself
• Or as a node. The node can be a floating node inside the building area, or can be attached to an edge of the building, with entrance=* to indicate the accurate location of an entrance door. The node system is particularly useful and needed when a building contains multiple addresses.

Addresses in Belgium require two tags: addr:street=* and addr:housenumber=*.

• addr:street=* must be an exact match of the name=* tag of the street where it belongs. In a few rare cases where the address is not a street but a square or a park without a highway=* tag, you should use addr:place=* instead of addr:street=*.
• addr:housenumber=* is the unique value for this address. In general, addresses containing additional letters should be part of the house numbex, i.e. addr:housenumber=21A.

Additional tags like addr:city=*, addr:country=* and addr:postcode=* are not wanted anymore. Municipalities and postcode areas have been mapped in the entire country and provide this information much more reliably.