I am trying to experiment a bit with JOSM Editor, and I wanted to add the “colour:roof” key to a particular house.
However, I couldn’t find it among the listed keys in the JOSM Editor.
On there other hand, there is a “colour” key.
Is “colour” key always equal to “colour:roof” key?
The wiki.openstreetmap article seems to suggest so:
But I am still confused. Can’t the “colour” key represent a color of the house exterior walls?
Thank you for the reply.
There is a difference between colour and colour:roof, for the exact reason that you indicate: a house have multiple parts with different colours. The colour key could be used e.g. on a mailbox or a fire hydrant, for the roof you have to use “colour:roof”
There is a JOSM preset that should help you with the 3D mapping of a house (which includes colour:roof) “3D Simple Buildings”.
The same author made a plugin that allows you to preview the 3D modelling from within JOSM. look for kendzi.
BTW, for the walls it’s building:colour
JOSM doesn’t and cannot (the list is open-ended) know all possible keys. In some cases, you will need to enter keys manually.
When auto-completing, it tends to learn from the section of map already loaded and offer options that are used on other objects.
Thank you for the quick and informative reply Escada!
If “colour:roof” is not present among the offered keys in JOSM, can I simply type it down?
EDIT: I didn’t see your reply. Thank you hadw!
But what happens if I type down some key that does not exist? (for example: “asdsadad”)?
Will JOSM still accept it as a a valid key?
There is no list of valid keys against which JOSM could validate it, as anyone can create a new key. Consequently JOSM will accept it.
In that case, it should be sufficiently obvious to a human that is gibberish, and a later editor, at least if they are using an editor that doesn’t hide unknown keys, should clean it up.
More difficult can be small errors in keys and unnecessary invention of knew keys. The view tends to be that one should contact the author in the first case and cope with the latter in programs that use the data.
If you want to contribute to maps using a closed vocabulary, consider using Google, however I think you will find that there are too many things that you can’t encode.
This is very nice reply. Thank you hadw!
Can you be a bit more specific on this part please:
Google allow user contributions to their maps. Such contributions cannot, of course, then be used in OSM, unless submitted directly by the original contributor.
When I tried doing this, I found that they would only accept keys that were known to their editor. As a result, one of the problems was that that one could not map things that they had not allowed for.
The other problem I found was that all contributions were moderated before being made available, and I found that their moderators were too self important, and too legalistic in applying rules to reject contributions.
To compound the lack range of keys, I found that the documentation on those keys, and their rules was nothing like as clear as that in the OSM wiki.
Understood. Thank you for the clarification hadw!
I am not interested in Google Maps/Earth.
It’s not open source.
I have just discovered the wonderful world of OpenStreetMap and will stick with it!
Once we talk about the OSM wiki, shouldn’t the upper mentioned quote from the Key:roof:colour article:
be changed?
As escada explained in this topic:
So “colour” and “colour:roof” are two completely different tags. And are not synonyms when it comes to the color of the roof.
Or am I wrong?
With “the value syntax” the author means everything on the right hand side of the equation sign in other words the value of the tag.
So you can write the name of a colour there (e.g. red) or use a hex code (like #ff0000).
Ah, I see now. The syntax of the “colour:roof” value is identical to that of other keys which are using “colour” (“colour”, “colour:back”, “colour:text”…).
Thank you for the clarification escada!
To be clear, the documented tag is “roof:colour”, not “colour:roof”. It’s the colour of the roof you’re describing, not the roof of the colour. 