[Tagging] building=yes for multiple building

[Blake Girardot]

Hi Joost,

The main wiki entry on building tagging says this about building tagging:

"In addition outlines can either be simplified shapes or very detailed 
outlines which conform accurately to the shape of the building. It is 
not uncommon for buildings to initially be described as simple group 
outlines later be improved with more detailed outlines and to be split 
into individual properties."

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Buildings

I think that fits in well with the idea that mapping and tagging can be 
refined as part of the overall mapping process.

Although, I always encourage people to outline the individual buildings 
if you can tell they are individual building units, even with a shared wall.

The downside of not strictly encouraging that style of mapping is large 
blocks of buildings being outlined with one building=yes tag which is 
much less useful for most use cases of building footprints.

So for me only in the most extreme circumstances will I use a single 
building outline for what I suspect might be multiple individual 
buildings, but I do it once in a while if there is just no way to 
reliably distinguish what might be individual buildings.

Cheers
blake



On 3/16/2016 3:47 PM, joost schouppe wrote:
> Is it OK to map multiple buildings as one closed line with the
> building=yes tag? Or does building=yes imply it is one single building?
> There is the terrace value, but that implies one orderly structure, not
> the hodgepodge of houses, buildings and extensions that define
> organically grown blocks.
>
> There are a couple of "multiple" values too, which make sense, but is
> undocumented and maybe overly precise.
>
> --
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