[OSM-newbies] Building Outline Tags

[Serge Wroclawski]

Welcome to the project!

> 1.       When I add a new building that contains a POI

In most cases , a school or a church is a whole building, and not just
a room within a building, so I'm going to assume that in my answer.

> worthy entity as a
> shop or school, is the recommended practice to (a) add a new node inside the
> building outline with the POI data, (b) add the POI data to a node on the
> building outline as the entrance, or (c) add the POI tags directly to the
> building outline way?

C, unless that building is multi-use, in which case, A.

> 2.       If the tags are on the building outline and there is no additional
> node with the POI tags, will mkgmap reduce the building outline to a single
> node with tags for a GPS receiver?

OSM is a source of data for many maps, by many renderers which render
the data in many ways, of which mkgmap is only one.

Therefore we have a saying "Don't map to the renderer."- it's the
renderer's job to pick up and do the right thing.

I don't know mkgmap so I don't know what it does, but it it if happens
to be that mkgmap doesn't work this way, then we'd have to fix mkgmap.
But since this is so common, I'm fairly sure that it's fine and does
work.

> 3.       What about a large building that contains many shops, for example,
> in a shopping center?  I suppose all three possibilities above are possible,
> so is there a recommendation?

"They're tricky". And in those cases, A is the best you can do.

> 4.       If the recommendation is tagging the building outline (the method
> that seems the best to me), what do I do when I add a new building outline
> when there is an existing POI node with tags?

Move the relevant tags to the building outline and delete the node.

>  Is it better to edit other peoples work only to
> make things consistent (especially if there is a specific recommendation for
> a way to do things), or better to respect the way they have done things and
> leave inconsistencies in method as they are?

Consistent and correct is better. Maybe they didn't have time to add
it by anything but POI. You should feel free to improve upon the work.

> 5.       For all of these questions, is there written documentation that I
> missed?  I am talking about documentation for these specific questions—I
> have seen lots of other documentation.

Maybe. We have several help guides, as well as help.osm.org.

But the newbies list is a good resource to ask these types of questions.

- Serge