[OSM-talk] buildings

[Jon Burgess]

On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 22:14 +0100, Tom Chance wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 July 2007 21:59:01 Steve Coast wrote:
> > It strikes me that doing all the building outlines in london is very  
> > possible, and something we can do without visiting.
> 
> Absolutely. At the very least, getting big buildings like museums, hospitals, 
> schools, housing estates, etc. in place wouldn't be too hard.
> 
> 
> > So, my question is what's the status of building=* and what is the  
> > status of mapnik and t at h rendering it?
> 
> So far as I can tell it's still in the proposal stage:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/Building
> 
> I don't think any of them show up on mapnik, a few show up on t at h, other kinds 
> of building that don't use that key (like amenity=hospital) don't show up at 
> all and others (like amenity=school) show up without labels or much 
> indication of what they are on mapnik.
> 
> In other words, pretty mixed. If both mapnik and t at h supported a decent range 
> of buildings I'm sure the proposal would get more attention...
> 

Mapnik does support a mixture of building and amenity tags, but i'm sure
many more could be added:

$ grep building osm.xml
      <Filter>[railway] = 'station' or [building] = 'station'</Filter>
      <Filter>[building] = 'supermarket'</Filter>

so... building={station,supermarket} are both supported. There are
_many_ amenity tags supported by Mapnik although the icons tend not to
appear until quite a high zoom level:

$ grep amenity osm.xml
  <Style name="amenity">
      <Filter>[amenity]='post_box'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity]='post_office'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity]='pub'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity]='recycling'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity]='hospital'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity]='bus_stop'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity]='parking'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity]='place_of_worship'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity]='airport'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity] = 'university' or [amenity] = 'school'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity] = 'university' or [amenity] = 'school'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity] = 'parking'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity] = 'place_of_worship'</Filter>
      <Filter>[amenity] = 'pub'</Filter>

I agree that more of these should probably have any 'name=' tags
included as labels on the map.

> 
> > If those two or three things line up, should we start putting in the  
> > outlines of lots of buildings?
> 
> Some of us are doing this already ;)
> 
> Kind regards,
> Tom
> 

Jon