Building Types in use

General talk
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Hi everybody, first post. Not found recent posts regards the follows.

One area I know very well has a mix of town houses (multi story houses usually in blocks often with built in garage on ground level), “normal” UK semi-detached two story houses, detached and semi-detached, some with garages attached, and single story Bungalows, detached and semi-detached. In OpenStreetMap they are (at least for this large area) all shown as “Town Houses”. Is this level of detail useful/desired/or even accommodated, as the field info in edit has “Town Houses” separated but not other types?

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Hi Bad_Raven! OSM data can be viewed and edited in lots of different ways through lots of different tools. I’ve not come across “town house” as a specific description in OSM data before…

So we’re all on the same page in this thread, could you clarify exactly what you mean by this sentence? What editor/tool/map are you looking at that tells you they’re “town houses” (is that exact wording used somewhere)? Could you provide a link to the relevant part of the map so other people can take a look at the area?

To partially answer your question, various common values for the building=* key are documented at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:building. But that list Isn’t exhaustive – see Any Tags You Like.

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Err, Well,… I was looking direct online at www.openstreetmap.org, default everything, and (as only one example) the whole large area of semi-detached and detached bungalows (Littlehampton/Rustington border, West Sussex, England) are all identified as “Row of Town Houses”. I’ll go so far as to say many, 100s.

In “EDIT” there’s no “bungalow” option listed for choosing, though it does appear in the linked list you pointed me at.

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If you expand the “tags” section you can see the raw tags used - probably building=terrace. “Row of town houses” is the browser editor’s interpretation of the raw tag, but people who use other editors won’t necessarily be familiar with it.

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5

Hi,

For the benefit of others reading, an example building the OP is referring to.

Two things:

  1. This has been incorrectly mapped as building=terraced. Ideally, it should be split with an area for each house, each house should then be tagged building= semidetached_house or building=house + house=semi-detached (my preferred option).
  2. The iD editor actually shows this as “Row of terraced houses” for me. “Townhouse” is the US term for the GB “terraced house”. I suspect your browser’s language is not set to EN-GB.

Hope that helps.

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6

Thanks for various replies.

My system(s) are set to UK English.

The Tag does indeed incorrectly state Terrace, but in the pulldown list of choices there is no “bungalow” option to enable correction (though it would be a massive job TO correct the large numbers involved!)

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For “bungalow” - see Tag:building=bungalow - OpenStreetMap Wiki

Problem here is that this term has multiple meanings.

The generic tagging for a single-storey detached house is building=detached + building:levels=1.

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Hi Bad_Raven, In my view, and agreeing along with others.
A ‘town-house’ is a building = detached/semi or terraced set over three floors. The UK adopted the term ‘townhouse’ for the three-storey type of houses.
(still trying to work out how to tag).