[OSM-newbies] buildings as points and/or areas

[Someoneelse]

> Am I correct in assuming that I should now remove 
> those original nodes, or does it not matter if the node sits on top of 
> the building? 

I've no idea what "accepted practice" is, but speaking personally (and 
I'm new here myself) I'd remove the single node when the adding the 
outline.  After all, there's only one of the building concerned, not two.

In addition to it not being "correct" it will also cause confusion when 
someone does a search using the web site.  As an example, try searching 
for "Hathersage Cricket Club" (it's in Derbyshire in England).  There's 
only one of these, but because the way that marks the pitch, the 
pavilion, and the other corners of the ground are all tagged it looks 
like there are five.

On a Garmin (or at least on mine) it seems that, although some items are 
available as both polygons and as points (shopping/shop is one example, 
parking another) when you do a search on the device it'll only find 
points, not polygons (this is with .IMG files created using and old 
version of mkgmap).  For example, the Victoria Centre (in 
Nottinghamshire in England) is defined as a way.  On my Garmin map it's 
visible as a sightly lighter colour background only - there's no text 
label and a search doesn't find it.

A solution (to avoid adding confusion to the main map and to make 
polygon-only features searchable might be to process the .osm file used 
by mkgmap and add certain tags (such as amenity and shop) from any ways 
to the first node of that way.  The label wouldn't be optimally placed, 
but at least a POI search would find the item concerned.  Obviously, 
this .osm file altered in this way shouldn't find its way back into the 
OSM database - it's only to be used by mkgmap and then thrown away.