How to dispose old roof:material=Asbestos and other far more weird tagging? Fix it? Delete?

General talk
1

I spotted Way History: 406743733 | OpenStreetMap

features building:age=less_than_10 added more than 10 years ago

roof:shape=2 faces (pitched)

roof:material=Asbestos

roof:material=Asbestos seems obviously fixable to roof:material=asbestos

but maybe it would be better to revert this edit and restore building=yes ?

Maybe assume that data quality is about as good as grasp of tagging and revert such edits?

But tags look malformed, not insane so maybe repairing ones that can be repaired would make sense? (building:age=less_than_10 probably still should be simply reverted)

Added with changeset description #hotosm-project-1280 #opencities #opendri #missingmaps #MapGive #Sri-Lanka-Floods over 10 years ago so have not even tried reaching out to mapper.

I know that opening note or waiting for local mappers to fix it is an option, but realistically it is unlikely to result in a fix. While such confusing widespread tagging is not going to be welcome to new mappers, so I think that fixing it is worth it.

Just not sure which option is better.

1 Like
2

Just fix it, interpreting the current data and setting proper tags and values.

You can use building:start_date instead of the non-existent building:age

3

Be careful not to dispose of old roof:material=Asbestos without appropriate protection equipment.

18 Likes
4

Fixed this particular building, just as an example.

building=residential
building:levels=1
building:material=cement_block
building:start_date=early C21
roof:material=asbestos
roof:shape=gabled

However, there are a lot of such weird tagging in this area :slight_smile:

5

Most occurrences of building:start_date=* were added in bulk in Ottawa in November 2022, apparently to avoid confusion in case any building had been dual tagged as a shop or something. The established key is start_date=*. Though it sure would be nice if OSM would adopt the ISO 8601-2 (EDTF) standard for approximate dates, as OpenHistoricalMap has.

6

Yes, exactly. If there is any other feature tagged on the building outline, start_date becomes ambiguous.

7

The 2022 edit was a mass find-and-replace, so no consideration as to whether anything was dual tagged. If I were mapping more carefully, I’d take the opportunity to extract any POI into a coincident area or centroid point for the avoidance of doubt. Fortunately there’s no need in this case.