How to tag a regional building type: masia

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1

I’m trying to describe a series of buildings as masia, a type of rural construction in Catalan-speaking areas. To give a sense of their ubiquity, their number is in the order of tens of thousands across the territory [1] .

I can think of several ways of accomplishing this, but not having much experience with OSM yet, I would welcome some guidance:

  1. Using existing key/value tags. Those buildings were originally farmhouses, with most having been renovated as primary or secondary residence in the present day. So I guess the building:use=residential tag could also be added
    building=farm
building:architecture=vernacular
  2. Defining a new value (masia) for the building key. I guess in this case building:architecture=vernacular could be left out as it’s implied in masia
    building=masia
  3. Referencing the wikidata ID for this building type:
    building=farm
building:wikidata=Q585956

Which would be the most appropriate approach?

Thanks!

  1. Currently around 6k of historic importance with more included in municipal architectural property inventories. A survey from 1860 recorded ca. 20k of them. ↩︎

2

Do you mind describing the difference with the word in Mas (Mediterranean farmhouse) - Wikipedia ?

  1. =farm + building:architecture= + building:use= is certainly most needed. This is easily usable, and provides the essential info.
  2. “Masia” is apparently literally “farmhouse” or “country house”. It’s not very scalable to add every country’s term for a particular style of theirs in building= . Makes interpreting them more difficult. Existing cases =ger (what about =yurt ?) and =trullo are almost all mass added. At a small scale, eg =quonset_hut is quite international and universal, but it could still be discussed.
  3. building:wikidata= is mismatched. Should find a better *:wikidata=

There is ~700 building:style | Keys | OpenStreetMap Taginfo , although the use isn’t tidy now. This would match the literal meaning as in garden:style= (the other uses =kitchen etc isn’t a “style”), especially =zen in place of =japanese . Then building:style:wikidata=Q585956 can be added for building:style=masia . The format could even be defined as proper noun freeform text , similar to subject= .

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3

That doesn’t fit, because that’s already being used for the Wikidata ID of the individual building. What you’re looking for has been tagged building_subtype:wikidata - but only 16 times, by one user, so it’s not too late to come up with a better key name if we don’t like it, see @Kovoschiz’s reply.

Anyway, I think you would still want a human-readable tag, so how to tag the Wikidata ID is basically a separate question.

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4

Thank you for your feedback. Really appreciated.

From the masia article:

The estate in which the masia is located is called a mas.

Essentially a mas (the state) could contain a number of masies (the buildings). E.g. Mas Jordà (state) could include La Torre (building) and La Caseta (building).

In the case where the mas contained only one masia, mas/masia are interchangeably used. And often masies have the prefix “Mas” in their name (e.g. Mas Can Roure).

  1. “Masia” is apparently literally “farmhouse” or “country house”. It’s not very scalable to add every country’s term for a particular style of theirs in building= . Makes interpreting them more difficult.

Correct, it’s a farmhouse, yet in a specific style (vernacular) and period (e.g. 10th to 19th century). I suggested the regional style approach as I saw wikidata followed it.

Existing cases =ger (what about =yurt ?) and =trullo are almost all mass added. At a small scale, eg =quonset_hut is quite international and universal, but it could still be discussed.

I’m not sure I understand this point about regional types and the frequency of the tag usage. Would you mind expanding on it?

    1. building:wikidata= is mismatched. Should find a better *:wikidata=

Would you mind explaining why it is mismatched? Update: explained at How to tag a regional building type: masia - #3 by osmuser63783

Then building:style:wikidata=Q585956 can be added for building:style=masia . The format could even be defined as proper noun freeform text , similar to subject= .

This sounds interesting, although I don’t quite follow the “can be added” part. Do you mean each masia building would then have these two tags?

Apologies for the string of new questions, I’m new to OSM and I’m still learning!

Thanks.

6

If the buildings are in Spain, please consider to ask it in the OSM España group on Telegram: Telegram: Contact @OSMes

7

building=farmhouse farmhouse=masia ? This both specifies general building type, allowing it to be processed by various tools and expresses this extra detail.

If something wants, it can process this super-detail without trying to force all users of building values to support it.

8

building=farmhouse is an undocumented duplicate of building=farm and only used 315 times. building:style is also not very common, but at least 710 times in use.

For the masia tagging I would prefer:

building=farm
building:style=masia
building:style:wikidata=*
+
building:use=* and other appropriate tags.

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