Tagging several companies inside a single building

Hi,

This might be a simple question, but I couldn’t find the answer in the wiki. How do I tag a company location in a shared building? Or rather how do you tag companies in general? I’ve seen some example when an entire building is taged with “name=Company name”, but that doesn’t work when several businesses share the same building. There is also special tags for example shops, banks, restaurants, etc. But I can’t find a general tag, and none of these fits for an office building.
What I intended was more to tag the address of a company than to tag a specific service.

Thanks!

Håkan

In fact, most of buildings are shared by different users. Shops on groundlevel and residents on upper levels. Or multiple business offices like in your case.
The trend is to add a single node per shop/office inside the building. Adding the address is less clear. What I’m doing is to add the address only once on a single separated node I attach to the building facade to avoid duplicates. Then all GIS shall be able to find the relationship between the node and the polygon and all nodes inside that polygon (or if it is less intelligent, at least the nearest node address for a particular business/shop). Other contributors might think that each business/shop must contain the full address. It’s then easier and more clear when applications are using that data but imho it’s a lot of hand word for the software and introduces unnecessary duplicate information.

See examples in Paris:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=48.853562&lon=2.368353&zoom=18&layers=B000FTF

Thanks!

This is probably what I should do. So to continue my question, which tags should I use for this node? Is it enough to just use the “name” tag? I’d like to have some sort of tag like “company=yes” or “amenity=company” similar to “shop=general” or “amenity=bank” to describe what the name is for, but I can’t find any such examples. Then you could also add the tags “phone”, “fax”, “email”, “website” etc for the company.

Håkan

Maybe landuse=commercial is what I’ve been looking for?

So does the following seems like a good way to tag a single node as a company location?

landuse=commercial
name=Company Inc
phone=+1 23 456 7890
fax=+1 23 456 7891
email=info@company.com
website=www.company.com
url=www.company.com

Thanks again!

Håkan

Hm, once again I’m confused …

In the overview for landuse there seems like landuse=commercial can be applied to both areas and separate nodes, but in the detailed page it seems like it is only allowed on areas?

Håkan

I am new at OSM, but I think you need to break it up, and simplify it:

building=yes
name=Office Block 5
commercial=yes

You could add:
occupant=Company1
occupant=Company2

I do not think that phone details etc. belong on a MAP, which should be concerned only with geo-spatial relationships (which phone numbers and websites are not, they are “virtual”, and can be anywhere).

I am not going to use OSM to find a company’s phone number.

I am going to use OSM to help me locate a particular address, and inform me as to its relationships to roads, footpaths, public transportation etc. so I can plan a route to that address.

Hope this helps. :slight_smile:

Thanks! I’m also new to OSM, and that is why I’m confused about this issue, and I really appreciate your comments.

I can agree with you that phone etc might not be suitable for a map, but it seems like it is being used by others (even dough the proposal has been rejected), see Key:phone.

Anyway, my main goal is that I want the company names to be searchable, similar to nodes taged as
shop=supermarket
name=Supermarket name
because I would at least use OSM to find the address of (and then also the optimal route to) a business, that is not necessarily one of the standardized types such as shop, bank or restaurant.

I can’t find any documentation for the “occupant”-tag, so I wonder if it is a standardized tag? If not, then I would also assume that it won’t be searchable at the moment.

It seems to me that OSM’s policy is “if there isn’t a tag for what you need, then you may invent one”.

A new tag should be searchable in the raw OSM database (Eg a download of an area or even a whole country), but it will not necessarilybe rendered when the map is drawn. What gets rendered (if at all), and how it is rendered are features of the different rendering engines (Mapnik, Osmarender, Cycle Map Etc).

There has been discussion of an “office” tag a few times on the mailing list. So you could have office=yes or office=lawyer or office=government etc, plus the usual tags for the name, address, phone etc.
This would cover a lot of businesses that don’t fit as shops or amenities. Though i don’t think there’s been any proper proposals or anything on the wiki about this tag.

Perfect, thanks!

For futur references, here is a link to the discussion on the mailing list.

In my opinion it is overkill to invent more and more tags. Who of the mappers and map users will learn them all? Which Editors and Renderers will implement them all. On top of this we are trying to put them in an hierarchical scheme. A librarian knows about their deficiencies which lead to endless and recurring discussions. The reality is more a mesh. And for this we have relational databases.

No more words. Keep it small and simple.
The building is an area:

  • building=yes

  • name=abc

  • commercial=yes

Each company is a node at its (approximate) position in the building:
  • landuse=commercial

  • name=xy

In general the name is well known or describes the business.
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