Feriendorf am Eisenberg: Tagging of inofficial house numbers/ names with `addr:*`-tags: Correct or wrong use of `addr:*`-tags?

Help and support Tagging help & support
,
1

I have a question regarding the address tags at the “→ Feriendorf am Eisenberg ‘Günter Richta’” in Hessen, Germany:

In the real world, this is some kind of recreational facility with overnight stay. The area consists of (roughly)

  • different, separate areas (“Höfe” in German) where groups stay, sleep and eat that each consist of different houses, and
  • general facilities.

The “Höfe” have names each (“Goldbornhof”, “Lischerthof”, “Fichtenhof” and so on), and on each “Hof” the houses are numbered (1-5 in most cases).

In the map, this is currently represented by an use of the address tagging scheme which to me looks like abuse of address tagging – because address tagging should be for official, postal addresses.

Currently it is tagged as follows (as an example, I use → house 2 at “Fichtenhof”):

  • The country is tagged as Germany (addr:country=DE), which is correct,
  • the city is tagged as “Kirchheim” (addr:city=Kirchheim), which is correct,
  • the postcode is tagged as “36275” (addr:postcode=36275), which is correct,
  • the suburb is tagged as “Feriendorf am Eisenberg” (addr:suburb=Feriendorf am Eisenberg), which I question,
  • the street name is tagged as “Fichtenhof” (addr:street=Fichtenhof), which I question,
  • the house number is tagged as “2” (addr:housenumber=2), which I question.

The street on which this is is called “Eisenbergstraße”.

The official address of the “Feriendorf am Eisenberg ‘Günter Richta’” is, according to this:

Landeshauptstadt Hannover
Jugend Ferien-Service
Feriendorf Eisenberg 1
36275 Kirchheim

– which makes it arguable that “Feriendorf Eisenberg” can be a suburb (there is also the Hamlet “Feriendorf am Eisenberg” tagged as a point feature there) or a street name. But the house number of the whole place seems to be “1”.

In case that the individual parts really have official addresses (which I doubt), then I think it should be something like

Landeshauptstadt Hannover
Jugend Ferien-Service
Fichtenhof, Haus 2
Feriendorf Eisenberg 1
36275 Kirchheim

The service “PLZServer” by Deutsche Post does know “Feriendorf Eisenberg” as street of the city “Kirchheim Hess”, but it does not know “Fichtenhof” as street name, so I doubt that addr:street=Fichtenhof is correct.

On what rationale it is that official postal-address tags are used here to tag the individual “Höfe” and houses? Should some other tags be used – like name=Fichtenhof or something more applicable, non-addr:* on the outline of some built area or so, and "ref= or so for the number of the houses?

I mention @Nakaner, because it seems that that user introduced the addressing scheme.

Regards!

2

I share your doubts.

This is not a suburb but a private property desgned for youths holdays.

There are no public streets within the property, therefore there are no official street names. Fichtenhof is the internal name of the building complex, not a street name.

This is an internal number of a building within the complex “Fichtenhof” and not a housenbumber as part of a postal address.

The problem with addresses for buildings within a holiday village applies for nearly every “Feriendorf” in Germany and probably in other countries as well. The motivation to use fake postal addresses for these internal buildings or to place the internal number in a name-tag in most cases is to make them visible on the standard map. There have been a dozen topics concerning this problem in the “old” German forum over the past years without a final outcome so far.

I believe it would be very helpful to have a standard tagging scheme for these kind of properties, making it possible to tag internal street names as well as internal house/bungalow/cottage numbers and names without misusing “addr.” and “name” tags.

1 Like
3

I think these locations might be addr:unit=* or perhaps addr:flats=* depending on local preference. There was a recent discussion focussed on the UK about using addr:substreet for groupings “below” street level (mentioned here), this might be viable here for the grouping?

I know the emphasis is usually on delivering mail, but in some cases I think it serves to be a little flexible on what might be delivered. If a local restaurant might deliver food to a street name that isn’t on ‘official’ lists then it’s probably useful to have it recorded in some capacity.

4 Likes
4

I agree with that and that’s why I believe a tagging scheme for these properties would be helpful. Another user group are potential guests who could have a look in advance where one or the other available holiday cottage is exactly located within the premises.

This proposal came up in a recent discussion in the german forum as well and I believe this could be a useful option but any number entered as addr:unit will still not be rendered in carto if the building is tagged as tourism=chalet (don’t know why …) whereas if you tag the whole compound as tourism=chalet and the single units as building=house/bungalow/static_caravan and the like it should be working.

Would be interisting to learn what other mappers think about this issue.

5

This seems like something to be raised as an issue on their issue tracker if not done already. We should minimise the renderer’s influence on the tagging.

Not sure on the terminology here but if these are all managed from a central reception area then I would think it would be better to tag the whole area as as tourism=hotel and maybe leisure=resort.

6

Just a remark on this:

I believe this could be a useful option but any number entered as
addr:unit will still not be rendered in carto if the building is
tagged as tourism=chalet (don’t know why …) whereas if you tag the
whole compound as tourism=chalet and the single units as
building=house/bungalow/static_caravan and the like it should be
working.

I think one general rule is not to map for the renderer? So why is
considering what the mostly used renderer does of any relevance here?

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I always read that tagging should
not be done for the renderer, but the renderers should keep up with
the development of tagging schemes.

Regards!

7

You are definitely right but on the other hand it could not be wrong to search for pragmatical and simple solutions whatever the problem may be.

Houses/chalets/bungalows etc. in holiday villages usually have numbers which are not a part of a postal address. Nevertheless a lot of people understand the rendering of these numbers in carto as very useful (some reasons already quoted above). To bypass this problem some of them start to misuse the keys “addr:housenumber” or even “name” to enforce the rendering.

A pragmatical option could be the use of the established keys addr:place (for the holiday village) and addr:unit (for the housing units). This would make the “internal” addresses distinguishable from common postal addresses and could still satisfy the demand for rendering without waiting for the renderer to take action.

My comment you have been replying to was just to point out that the rendering rules (which sometimes are quite hard to understand) are a bit tricky for addr:unit - nothing but an additional information.

1 Like
8

if the number has nothing to do with a postal address it should not go into any addr:* tag. My suggestion is “ref”

1 Like
9

I like that idea. ref is also used elsewhere where there are numbered things. Sometimes it even gets rendered in some renderers, as far as I understand (local_ref which seems to be some variety of ref on public transport stops on public transport renderers.)

According to the wiki:

“ref” stands for “reference” and is used for reference numbers or codes. Common for roads, highway exits, routes, entrances to big buildings etc. It is also used for shops and amenities that are numbered officially as part of a retail brand or network respectively.

this reads fitting in this case.

Maybe there should be used some refined ref? Or just ref`?

Given we move the numbers out of addr:* tags. What do we do with the names of the “Höfe”? Just name=Fichtenhof and so on, on the area (with landuse or so) which defines the Hof?

10

“Ref” would be possible although these house numbers are not really reference numbers. In fact I understand these numbers as some kind of address used by various users (delivery services, tourists etc.) and in many cases even the postal service although they are definitely no official postal addresses.

Moreover “ref” for these kind of buildings is definitely not renderes in carto and that is the reason why in most holiday villages (at least in Germany) the numbers of these holiday chalets are tagged as “addr:housenumber” or “name” as mentioned earlier. Apperently many (if not most) of the colleagues mapping holiday villages do not favour “ref”.

1 Like
11

hm, as far as I understand from the specific place concerned in the opening posting, the numbers are only for internal use there (for the groups to ease organising who sleeps where, for administrative purposes at the venue, …).

I think it is comparable to room numbers in hotels. Also there, the Pizza delivery service can deliver something ;-).

How are room numbers in hotels tagged? Could this be applied to this case?

Hm.

Until I read a withdrawel or relativation of the rule “don’t map for the renderer” I cannot accept “not renderes in carto” as an argument that things should (or should not) be done in some way (only as an explanation why people do things in some way).

12

Das ist mein Favorit

siehe hier: Way: 1005054382 | OpenStreetMap

2 Likes
13

For simple indoor tagging the wiki suggests ref for room numbers. Seems a bit generic, but at least it’s documented.

I consider the delivery of pizza to be a good enough reason to use a tag in the addr: scheme, but that’s the perspective of someone who has lived in a country where the postal service won’t deliver to individual houses but other services will. To me it’s still an address.

Edit: no idea how the plaintext emoticon escaped the emoji treatment in the original message but not in the quote. It’s still showing in plain text in the source.

14

Rooms in hotels are indoor mapping which is not the issue here.

Full acc … but this is not my argument. Actually there are lots of places of the same or similar kind (all kinds of holiday villages and resorts) which lack a widely accepted tagging scheme. Mappers start misusing inappropriate tags to achieve a rendering of certain values (internal house numbers) in carto.

Just some samples besides your Feriendorf am Eisenberg:

If we can agree on appropriate tags (like addr:unit) for those objects (which are units of a larger complex) which at the same time fulfill the desire for rendering of these values we do have a pragmatical solution and that is what I am argueing for.

I agree with @InsertUser and @Mammi71 that addr:unit would do well.

Complete address tagging (depending on the local situation) could be
addr:city + addr:postcode (if applicable)
addr:street + addr:housenumer (for the postal address of the administrative building, if applicable)
addr:place for the whole place (if applicable)
addr:unit (for the single units)

Looks good to me … :slightly_smiling_face:

Edit: Dunno why the links appear as big fat boxes in my post - I just entered a simple link line … must be a feature of Discourse, but I gained another badge for that … “Master of the Onebox” :crazy_face:

2 Likes
15

With “comparable” I mean for what purposes the numbers are used on site. You could think of the site as a “hostel where every single rooms equals a small house”.

If OSM makes a strict distinction here then OK!

Sounds good to me, but we still miss something:

For the given example this is not enough. We have in that case 5x the same “agglomerations” (what I called with the German name “Höfe”, → here is one of them) of buildings with the same house numberings 1-5 (+ another “agglomeration” which is different, but also has numbers 1-3). They have names: “Buchwaldhof”, “Steinsgebißhof”, “Löscherhof”, “Fichtenhof”, “Lischerthof”, and “Goldbornhof”. Those names are not postal addresses as well. We need to handle them too.

As it is now, they are an area tagged as

place=neighbourhood
landuse=residential
name=Fichtenhof

I think “neighbourhood” is misleading here as well; according to → the wiki on “Key:place” a neighbourhood is a part of an urban settlement which is definitely not the case here, and it has the following description:

A neighbourhood is a smaller named, geographically localised place within a suburb of a larger city or within a town or village

I doubt that place=* at all is correct here, because as far as I understand the wiki page all values for place= regarding places with buildings are for places where people permanently live, which is not the case here.

How do we handle this case, address-tag-wise and “place”/ landuse/ amenity/ …-tag-wise?

“Landuse”/…-wise I have no idea, but name=Fichtenhof should go there I think.

Address-wise: What about
addr:block=Fichtenhof?,
so that the complete address tagging (depending on the local situation) could be

  • addr:city + addr:postcode (if applicable)
  • addr:street + addr:housenumer (for the postal address of the administrative building, if applicable)
  • addr:place for the whole place (if applicable)
  • addr:block for the agglomeration (if applicable)
  • addr:unit (for the single units)

Or is addr:block here the wrong thing?

(Off-Topic) Rendering of URLs in this forum (*click* to unfold):

This is some automagic of discourse, the software behind that Forum. If you put an URL on it’s own on a line, it tries to fetch a summary from the target and renders that. You can circumvent that by either using explicit markdown syntax like

[OSM way 1005054386](https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1005054386)  
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1005054386](https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1005054386)  
[openstreetmap.org/way/1005054386](https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1005054386)

which renders as

OSM way 1005054386
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1005054386
openstreetmap.org/way/1005054386

or by putting another character on the line where the URL is, could even be some non-printable unicode character like “zero width non joiner”:

&jwnj; https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1005054386

which renders as

‌ Way: 1005054386 | OpenStreetMap

(somehow still gets interpreted: The title of the page is fetched and the URL is replaced by the title, but at least the box is not there. To inhibit automagic interpretation explicit syntax like layed out in the first example seems to be needed.)

1 Like
16

I have seen the “blocks” containing a couple of houses and named as “… hof” in your opening post and believe that addr:housename would fit here if no one has an objection against that. Just forgot to include this in the list of tags. So in your sample the houses of “Fichtenhof” would have internal addresses like

addr:city=Kirchheim
addr:postcode=36275
addr:street=Eisenbergstraße
addr:housenumber= ? (is there any official housenumber for the administration building?)
addr:place=Feriendorf am Eisenberg (probably a redundant info to the name tag of the village …)
addr:housename=Fichtenhof
addr:unit=1 (2,3,4,5)

I believe this could be a useful tagging scheme for all kinds of holiday villages … what to you think?

In regard of the “landuse question” I have no doubt that the whole place requires a “tourism” tag which is alreade implicated by the name “Feriendorf”. Unfortunately I cannot find a tourism-tag representing a youth holiday village. Tourism=chalet will fit holiday villages with self-contained houses but that does not really fit here. Maybe tourism=hostel …??.. although a hostel usually is one building and not a holiday village. Any other idea?

Thanks for the detailed explanation :+1:

17

Ahoj,

I have seen the “blocks” containing a couple of houses and named as
“… hof” in your opening post and believe that addr:housename would
fit here if no one has an objection against that.

You mean “addr:housename” even if it is several house?

The OSM Wiki says about it:

The name of a house.
This is sometimes used in some countries like England, Spain, Portugal, Latvia instead of (or in addition to) a house number.

I don’t see why it is applicable here.

Why do you think “addr:block” is not suited here?

Just forgot to
include this in the list of tags. So in your sample the houses of
“Fichtenhof” would have internal addresses like

addr:city=Kirchheim
addr:postcode=36275
addr:street=Eisenbergstraße
addr:housenumber= ? (is there any official housenumber for the administration building?)

In this specific example, although the venue is situated on the street with the name “Eisenbergstraße”, the official postal address is

Landeshauptstadt Hannover
Jugend Ferien-Service
Feriendorf Eisenberg 1
36275 Kirchheim

where “Feriendorf Eisenberg” goes where normally the street name goes. So we could either put 'addr:street=Feriendorf Eisenberg", or maybe “addr:place=Feriendorf Eisenber” would be in this case correct?

I believe this could be a useful tagging scheme for all kinds of
holiday villages … what to you think?

I think we should arrive at something that is applicable for as many kinds of holiday villages as possible.

In regard of the “landuse question” I have no doubt that the whole
place requires a “tourism” tag

Yes, something like this. My question was how to tag the specific areas with the houses.

The whole area has forests, fields, meadow (some of the crossing the border of the “Feriendorf”), build-up areas, water, playgrounds, sport areas, … and I think those sub-areas should be mapped (they already are),
I wonder which tag to give the built-up areas.

What do others think?

which is alreade implicated by the
name “Feriendorf”. Unfortunately I cannot find a tourism-tag
representing a youth holiday village. Tourism=chalet will fit holiday
villages with self-contained houses but that does not really fit
here. Maybe tourism=hostel …??.. although a hostel usually is one
building and not a holiday village. Any other idea?

Could leisure=resort apply here?

Do we need to invent a new tag here?, e.g.

tourism=holiday_village (this can then apply to anything from a resort for scouts to a 5-star-resort) and to specify further
holiday_village=* (need to invent tags)?

Or maybe hostel is fine here, since people can also just use it like a hostel?

According to taginfo tourism=holiday_resort is already used twice.

Note that there is already leisure=summer_camp, but it seems to mean something different.

The current situation is that the whole area (defined as a multipolygon relation, it seems that inner forests and water bodies and maybe others – seems quite complex --, are made to not belong to the landuse=recreation_ground area that way) has the following tags:

landuse=recreation_ground
name=Feriendorf am Eisenberg "Günter Richta"
alt_name=Feriendorf Eisenberg

… maybe it is also fine to keep it that way, and tag the individual houses or built-up areas additionally with some hostel tag?

18

Yea, addr:housename is usually the name of a single house but I do not see any reason why it should not be used for a “Hof” consisting of a couple of house units. I did not consider addr:block as this is meant for a city block acc. to the wiki. Nevertheless addr:block as well as addr:housename could be useful in your case imho.

According to ALKIS there is no address or housenumber like “Eisenberg 1” in the compound and the area is labeled as “Feriendorf Hannover” (which is not an address anyhow).

That is why I understand that Eisenberg 1 is not part of the official address but just used by the administration of the Feriendorf. The postal address according to Deutsche Post is

Feriendorf Eisenberg
36275 Kirchheim

and I am sure every supplier of anything will surely find the place using this address.

The only road leading to the Feriendorf is the Eisenbergstraße and that is why I used it in the address tags - can be removed if not wanted. addr:place will do fine instead of addr:street:

addr:city=Kirchheim
addr:postcode=36275
addr:place=Feriendorf Eisenberg
addr:housename or addr:block=Fichtenhof
addr:unit=1 (2,3,4,5)

Would that suit you? From my point of view (looking for a scheme applicable for all kinds of holiday villages) it is still fine.

The whole area of the Feriendorf should have a “tourism” tag in my opinion as it includes all kinds of amenities/naturals/leisure being available for the use of the kids having their holidays there. There is no reason why parts of the compound should not get additional tags (for the swimming pond, playgrounds, pitches, grassy or wooded areas and the like) but all this is part of the Feriendorf. Compare it to the area of a school or kindergarten which is handled in the same way.

leisure=resort does not fit as it primarily features the “leisure” (every day free time activities) and not the “tourism” (travelling somewhere for holidays) aspect.

leisure=summer_camp does not fit as well as you mentioned already.

landuse=recreation_ground would be fine if the main purpose would be offering a recreation area open to the public but this seems not to be the case. According to the official website the main purpose is holidays for kids groups, school classes and the like.

tourism=holiday_village would suit best - used 48 times so far but not documented in the wiki -
this would be my persoal choice but I have zero experience in adding it to the tourism wiki page.

Btw: I do not see any reason to tag this compound as a MP. According to the KISS rule a simple polygon would do well.

Again I do not see any reason for 2 names “Feriendorf Eisenberg” and “Feriendorf am Eisenberg”. The latter has no significant difference to the first and I could not find it in any publication. Wherever you find information about it the name is Feriendorf Eisenberg “Günter Richta” and this is the official name as well.