Consistency between building use and node amenity tags

Pardon my ignorance as I am still quite new to this. I have been using streetcomplete to learn more about OSM and mapping in general and its a great app, kudos to the developer.

After a while answering quests I noticed (on rare occasion) the following issue and I wanted to ask the forum what it all means. Is it a bug or a feature?

I would try to classify a building and not find an appropriate building tag among the ones offered within the streetcomplete taxonomy. So I would leave a note, which fairly soon somebody would delete because “the building is already tagged”. Not wanting my precious work being deleted by strangers for no good reason :slight_smile: I tried to dig into why this happens. So this is what I have found so far:

Streetcompete quests focus on the building use tags which may not be set (and may lack an accurate classification). On the other hand building type is not shown on OSM web, instead a node associated with the building may have an amenity tag. The people deleting my “redundant” edits see the amenity tag but not the missing building tag that streetcomplete is requesting.

Assuming I am interpreting correctly what is happening, it would mean that there is some sort of missing link / consistency check between amenities and building info.

Can you provide an example of one of these cases, so we can look at the OSM data and the note? My initial sense is that maybe the note isn’t providing enough context for other contributors to realize what needs to be clarified.

If you mean notes like these:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/2640856
https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/2628436

they shouldn’t have been closed because they are not resolved.

The question in the note is “Unable to answer “What kind of building is this?””.
And this StreetComplete quest is to change a general building=yes tag to something more specific [building=apartments, building=house, building=civic etc.]

So what you can do:
log in to your account in the web browser and edit these buildings in iD editor manually. And tell the people that they shouldn’t have been closed the notes if they didn’t change the building tag.

Thanks, another user filtered / posted already the relevant examples :-). The context suggestion is really useful, I guess realizing that different map editors may see different “slices” and adding sufficient context helps smooth the processes. Maybe the tools could also help by automatically adding some more context (just a thought, not sure if this is a more general concern)

very helpful, thank you!

I like StreetComplete and use it a lot myself, but I would be cautious about using it to add notes for other mappers unless something is clearly wrong or out of date. Reviewing notes one by one is time-consuming work, so use other mappers’ time wisely. In this example, there is nothing actually incorrect about building=yes, even if it could be made more precise. I probably wouldn’t leave a note to other mappers for that - I might edit the building later myself in ID or JOSM. But if the building had been demolished for example, that would definitely be worth leaving a note.

On your point “there is some sort of missing link / consistency check between amenities and building info”, this is actually quite difficult to check systematically because there are so many variations in the real world. A shopping mall (one building) may contain multiple mapped amenities - shops, cafes, and so on. A museum building may contain a cafe, toilets etc. A church building may no longer be used as a church, it may have been converted for use as a nightclub, so the combination building=church and amenity= nightclub would be perfectly valid. And so on.

If you leave notes with StreetComplete I would strongly encourage to attach photo, it allows to fix issues remotely.

Also, I would say that “entertainment venue” fits general “commercial” type and can be tagged as such. If you want to tag with extra detail - installing also Vespucci is likely a good idea.

My typical editing method is to use StreetComplete with switching to Vespucci if SC is not enough. And leave notes if I am out of range of mobile internet.

Is there some OSM related project that aims to tackle this type of challenge (creating some type of logically consisent model of map features). Maybe some sort of knowledge base, ontology or related database? I’d be interested to join and / or contribute.

That would be amazing if only such thing existed

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal_process are closest - see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Proposals_with_%22Voting%22_status for current votes

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging_mailing_list is place where such topics are discussed (though tagging mailing list is more about getting feedback on tagging ideas)