[Tagging] Nodes, Ways, and Buildings

[Tom MacWright]

Hey all,

Sorry about being mainly uninformed about tagging culture and the OSM
Way in general - I've been working with the data and the toolset but
absent on the mailing lists.

So, I came up with an idea for a cool project that would contribute to
OSM in a pretty simple, neat way. One would have a quick webapp that
could be accessed on an iPhone/Android and would use geolocation to
figure a users location as well as possible, and then present a plain
list of building names around the user and the choice of how many
stories the building had. There would be no map on the mobile - no
weird augmented-reality thing or whatever - just the user would be
able to see 'Frank's Coffee' from where they're standing, and click on
the button for 1, 2, 3, or 'enter a number' stories (floors) the
building has. The feedback loop would be a neat map of a single city
at a time rendered with Mapnik's BuildingSymbolizer, which supports
variable feature heights.

This was neat, but then I realized that what I'd like to present to
users (Mid City Cafe) is actually a point, rather than the way, which
is "1626 14th St NW" at best. Thus one would have to do some kind of
weird point-in-polygon math in order to present a list of options, and
then the data being tagged would be a point with a number of stories -
something that seems weird to me.

So the question is, after this long-winded nonsense: are the
identities of buildings always going to be separate from the buildings
themselves in OSM parlance? Is this a regional thing, or is it just
with semi-sparse DC data that I'm testing with? Are other people doing
point-in-polygon math to do what I'd like to do (having buildings
represent places rather than material brick and mortar)?

Or is there a different way to pull this off that I'm missing and
trying to force the technology to bend the wrong way?
Thanks OSM gurus! All knowledge appreciated.

Tom MacWright