I’ve added 7A School Lane to OSM but I got the feeling I was fighting the editor, for two reasons:
\ but it doesn’t seem to work predictably).house=apartment which I can use to tag that it’s a single flat.I’m probably doing this wrong. What is the right way?
I’d just use building=residential and nothing else.
I would typically have a single area simply as a “building” (no overlapping areas), with a seprate node for the flat and a seperate node for the business within. Not sure of how common this approach is but it feels hard to give “priority” to either use of the building when it is split like this.
You’re right though, there’s no nice node choice for the flat by itself.
I figured the right solution was simply to create two areas and stack them, but I feel like I’m actually setting up a horrible little problem for anyone else who comes along and wants to edit one or the other.
Is this not a problem people have when mapping multi-level buildings e.g. in shopping centres?
Is there enough from here to be applicable? - appears to be discussing the UK though not tagged in the UK forum.
What ramthelinefeed mentions in there is probably what I would follow for a simple instance such as this. Residential building with a seperate node for the business.
Why would you map the flat? We generally don’t map individual flats so for example in a tenement with 12 flats or a tower block with 100 we don’t have 12 or 100 individual nodes / areas? What is it about the flat that you want to record?
Is your goal to record the addresses and the address is separate from the shop’s address?
I would just draw the building footprint as an area (which value should go in building= is debatable) and then place a node for the shop, plus address nodes as needed for the entrances, and make sure the nodes all have level tags.
If you really wanted to, you could use 3D mapping conventions and would end up with 3 overlapping polygons:
building=yes + building:levels=2
building:part=retail + building:levels=1 + level=0
building:part=residential + building:levels=2 + building:min_level=1 + level=1
Oh jeez that’s horrible.
Fair enough, three it is.
You also just map it as an address node and avoid overlapping polygon frustrations.
That will work, although it’s more about the type of building (the architecture / design) than about what’s there right now. When the shop unit on the ground floor is converted to a flat, or the flat above is converted to additional storage for the shop, these tags don’t change.
We could do with a building= value that says there’s a shopfront on the ground floor, and all floors above (1 or more) are flats. Essentially a shorthand for the above, that doesn’t require drawing building parts.
Looked at what you done and I’ve confident in saying the mapping is wrong. What would I suggest?
There is only a single building, which appears split into two properties with two addresses.
An address for the Ground Floor business
An address for the First Floor is a residence, which will be partially on the ground to allow access. (likely from rear building?)
Fist off, you can’t split the building into two buildings. There is only one building.
The way I’d map this is to
3D Mapping, does allow you to show there are two separate parts to this building. It’s complicated and I’d suggest using JOSM. But is arguably unnecessarily complicated. You’d also have the residential property being split between Ground Floor and First Floor. The property is likely to consist of and entrance on the Ground Floor, maybe a hallway, then stairs to the First Floor, and then the residence area. Mappers simply are not going to know what is going on inside a building.
In this use “flat” is not really the same as in the case of a single dwelling in a block of flats. We’re probably talking here about a building that is the same size as a standard house (maybe it was even built as a house originally), but where the ground floor is used as a shop. In British English, the dwelling above is often referred to as a flat. It would be desirable to be able to record its existence in OSM. (For blocks of flats we can record the multiple individual flats in one go with building=apartments + addr:flats=1-n, but that approach doesn’t work for a building that comprises one shop and one flat.)
Huh. Here’s the location on Google Streetview (not a suitable source for mapping obviously). We’re talking about the building with Heaton Hops on the ground floor (that’s no. 7).
Maybe there’s something I’ve missed but I know what a flat is. I just meant, we map certain things, buildings, entrances, POIs. A shop is a POI so the shop gets its own node, the flat isn’t a POI so it doesn’t. There’s no amenity=flat. If there was, then every tower block would need a hundred of them.
In this case I would put a way for the building, a node for the shop entrance, a node for the shop, and a node for the flat entrance (not sure where that is - it’s worth checking).
Traditionally the flat above the shop was where the shopkeeper lived and would have been where the shopkeeper and family lived and would have been a single address.
Later they become separate units as immortalised by Pulp in Common People.
Yes, completely agreed, and if it’s just a horrible and frustrating experience (rather than me just not knowing something that makes it much easier) then I don’t think the cake is worth the carnival in these instances. I don’t want people having to fight with iD to update the shop if it’s replaced, for example.
I was using this as an opportunity to practice 3D mapping on something fairly simple, and to learn why I’m finding it so hard. I have an eye towards the Merseyway up the road, which would benefit from some 3D mapping to make it navigate a little less like a car park with some shops squidged between the lanes 
and so that it’s easier to fill out the individual shops.
3D Mapping is mostly for the outer shape of a building. If doors and nodes are not detailed enough, for large complex buildings, I would use indoor mapping.