Hi,
as I found it a great idea that Simon is pushing this, I thought of giving it a try and test indoor mapping for buildings I know. I read the original indoor mapping discussion and the whole discussion in this thread.
But let me start with a paradigm that is important to me. Imho it’s of importance that indoor mapping can still be done with the editors out there (I’m using JOSM) without big pain. Also, other mappers that are not aware of indoor mapping should not have problems to extend regular stuff (like buildings, POIs,…). As a third criterion it should be hard, to destruct a mapped building but easy to fix accidental bugs.
That said, I like the proposal and especially Tobias’ changes to it. I think removing all uses of relations gives it a big advance in usability without loosing expressiveness. However, there are imho still some missing parts and some parts that could be changed. I’ll try to share my findings, even if I don’t have a solution.
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There should be an indoor=level to cover the complete area that belongs to this specific level. This makes it easier when not everything of the building is covered for each level or when different building parts have different level heights and stuff like this. indoor=level can be extended with name=* and height=* tags to further describe it.
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There should be an indoor=platform for areas without walls. I consider a indoor=corridor to have walls, but there are many buildings that have “corridors” with holes, so platform could be used here. I’d also suggest to use it for stairways, but see below.
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I created some filter rules for JOSM, so I don’t see all levels at once but can select whatever level I want. This is great but induced the question about node-sharing. In my opinion, each level should reuse nodes. That is: if you have two levels which are congruent, they should use the same nodes but two ways. It makes the building clearly represented and it’s quite hard to add two nodes at the same position anyway. The proposal should be explicit about this.
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Tagging stairways and elevators is causing headache. When I use Josm to filter level 1, I’d like to see doors/highway=steps/elevator for level 1 only and possibly a simple way to see where I can go from there.
4a: Elevators: I used indoor=verticalpassage for the elevator outline and put a door=yes with level=1;2;3 on it. However, this makes the filter rules more complicated. Also it was not clear, if the indoor=verticalpassage should be mapped once or for each level? The buildingpart:verticalpassage=elevator is a bit strange, too, I’d prefer something else for that.
4b. Stairs: As suggested by Tobias, I made use of highway=steps which sounds quite useful to me. However, it leads to a problem of proper node sharing and I was not able to map this in an easy and simple way. I started to draw a verticalpassage twice (level=0 and level=1). I added a indoor=platform twice (level=0 and level=1) for the connection of highway=steps. By connecting one end of the way to platform with level=0 and the other end to the platform at level=1, one can see the purpose of these stairs. However, adding another stairway from level=1 to level=2 is cumbersome: You can not make node sharing, as the node has to stick with the platform at the level you want to go. Making the nodes congruent is difficult.
Speaking of stairways: What about stairs that are in the middle of a corridor. Or think of a big railway station with escalators just in the middle of the hall? Anyways, I like the current state and for the buildings I tested it made fun to map and was easy enough at the same time. I could represent mostly anything I liked and the biggest missing point are stairways as noted above.