[Tagging] how to map soft story/soft storey buildings properly?

[Stefano Maffulli]

Hello folks,

i'm a bit confused about how to map soft story buildings. The Wikipedia
definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_story_building is

soft story building is a multi-story building in which one or more floors
have windows, wide doors, large unobstructed commercial spaces, or other
openings in places where a shear wall would normally be required for
stability as a matter of earthquake engineering design.

A few years ago, there was an effort (promoted by World Bank, it seems) to
map buildings in OSM for Katmandu where they used key
buidling:soft_storey=yes/no. They never proposed a formal tag. The results
of that effort is a bit confusing and I'm not sure it's the best approach.
See
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Kathmandu_Living_Labs/exposuresurvey#Building_Structure

There are ~13,000 buildings using that key, yes/no
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/building:soft_storey

I'm not convinced soft_storey should be its own key or rather a structural
characteristic of a building. For example, building:structure is widely
used to tell if buildings are made of masonry, reinforced concrete, etc. It
would make sense for soft_storey to be a value of that key.
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/building:structure

The values are not standardized and lots of spelling creativity is in that
key.  BTW, there is no wiki page for building:structure either.

Question for the community: does it make sense to add soft story
information using the key building:soft_storey=y/n (similar to
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:building:fireproof) or should I use
building:structure=soft_storey?

Thanks,
stef
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