[OSM-talk] [HOT] Why the HOT obsession with low quality buildings in Africa ?

[Jean-Marc Liotier]

On Tue, July 3, 2018 10:46 am, Rupert Allan wrote:
>
> [..] 'some data being better than no data' [..]

Yes but, in that case, landuse combined with density and/or building type
attributes do the job more cheaply and with none of the low quality
stigma. But, of course, there may be other reasons for insisting on
building shapes.

> Building materials and standards are used to map [..]
> A simple look at OSM metrics of, say, thousands of
> grass rooves amongst tin rooves in a fire, or hundreds of mud
> walls instead of concrete in an immanent flood, really helps.
> At this point, this data directly impacts
> and/or saves thousands of lives.
>
> That's my obsession.
>
> *Rupert Allan*
> Country Manager - Uganda

While building=hut is a useful distinction that is widely recorded in
relevant locations
(https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/building=hut#map, the
building=material you seem to refer to is actually not very popular
outside of Europe
(https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/building%3Amaterial#map) - in your
country it only appears 693 times (http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/A2C)

Most of the buildings I seen in Senegal and Mali are building=yes with no
other attribute... So, for now at least, this is not a question of
building materials.