[Tagging] building = house vs detached.

Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdreist at gmail.com
Tue Jul 24 22:19:48 UTC 2018



sent from a phone

> On 24. Jul 2018, at 09:36, Andrew Hain <andrewhainosm at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> We can have building=bungalow but that is redundant when it just means building:levels=1.


I am still not sure building=bungalow really says nothing more than 1 floor, but if it did, it is ok.


> 
> We can have building=detached, building=semi,  building=house with most people using them incorrectly or
> inconsistently or we can have building=residential and let the footprint indicate the type. 


you can’t get the type by looking at the footprint.


Or, if you insist, add
> 
> residential=* where clarification is desirable.



there’s no benefit in splitting one good tag in 2, if the second makes the first redundant.


> 
> We've just had a lot of people say "The wiki says this should be building=detached but I always use building=house."


They can do this, detached houses are a subclass of houses. Nobody urges them to add more detail.


> That indicates the tags don't map well to how people actually think.


come on, a handful of contributions to this thread, most people are ok with how it is and don’t engage in this discussion, because it is clear it will most likely not lead to changes in the tagging recommendations for residential buildings.

There are more than a million detached houses mapped as such. It is a common term, people understand it well, it won’t go away.


  It also means that you can't rely on the value
> 
> used indicating what it is meant to.  We can carry on with the current muddle or we can try to do better.  You vote muddle.


Can you give an example why what you describe is “muddle” and how you cannot rely on it? How would the situation improve if all this information was replaced by “residential”?

I would not call this “muddle” but plurality. We are still not at a very good point with buildings (80% still not classified at all), but the situation is improving, last time I looked at it, more than 90% of all values were “yes”.
Shall we retag all building=residential to building=yes for consistency (after all it is likely that most residential buildings are tagged as “yes”)?


Cheers,
Martin 


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