For background, I recently started a thread on the Finnish forum[1] on tagging buildings in Finland with one or another kind of architectural heritage status in the City Plan.
During that discussion I realized that buildings and sites chosen by the architectural heritage organization Docomomo (or the International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement) have not apparently been tagged in OSM. At least, I couldn’t find anything in the Wiki nor on the map that would indicate it. Can anyone confirm this?
Since Docomomo publishes lists (and Books) of the sites and building they promote, it ought to be not only easy—but more importantly noncontroversial[2]—to source the status of these buildings from their publications and add them to OSM.
I was wondering, what would be the most appropriate tags for this.
Buildings with an architectural heritage status in the city plan (and UNESCO sites, etc.) can be indicated in OSM as such with e.g. the protect_class=22 tag. An official preservation status has (usually, and at least some) concrete consequences e.g. in the Building Code. This status and the consequences it confers are also enforced by some municipal or state authority (and in case of UNESCO at the penalty of losing the coveted status). Docomomo does not have the authority to enforce anything. Thus the buildings, I suppose, do not have an ‘official’ heritage status qua Docomomo sites. Though, as with UNESCO, presumably substantial enough alterations will result in a building being kicked out of Docomomo lists as well. In that sense, it could be argued, UNESCO is no more ‘official’ than e.g. Docomomo.
Would you think it OK for the protect_class=22 tag to be used for Docomomo sites and buildings as well? The Wiki page for the heritage-key suggests that different protected buildings can and should be referenced further. So a ref:xxx=Docomomo and more exact source= -tags would take care of that.
Any thoughts or objections?
Finnish is a notoriously difficult language to translate, so many things will get lost in the translation. ↩︎
i.e. no license difficulties in referencing and sourcing the data from a book. ↩︎
You say in a footnote that there are no license difficulties - why do you say this? I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that it doesn’t seem obvious to me. Where specifically do you propose sourcing the data?
I couldn’t find any terms of use on docomomo.com, but the terms of use on the US site don’t seem encouraging: “Company Content on the Website is provided to you “AS IS” for your information and personal use only and may not be used, copied, reproduced, aggregated, distributed, transmitted, broadcast, displayed, sold, licensed, or otherwise exploited for any other purposes whatsoever without the prior written consent of the respective owners.”
Oh, that’s an excellent question! I have to say, I’m not really sure either.
My idea was to use the books (and reports) Docomomo publishes as the sources. I would have thought that referring to a book (or report) as a source would be noncontroversial, as the only ‘data’ that would copied was the fact that a certain building was mentioned in the book (or report). Perhaps it would be better to call this action ‘citation’ rather than sourcing, since no actual data is copied?
It might not hurt to send Docomomo an email asking about this for sure!
[Edit:] I’m still left wondering: in the event that I send an email to Docomomo asking whether I can use the lists on their webpage to tag the buildings in OSM & they reply with a resounding “No!”, would they have a legal leg to stand on if I were to just cite their books? I should say, I have used many books a number of times to add tags to OSM (mostly start_date=* and architect=*, etc. and sourced them to the books). The books are copyrighted to the author for sure, but retrieving specific factual information like that from a book is surely kosher, no?
Aside from possible licensing issues, on the suggestion to use protect_class - it’s not clear to me if these are really protected areas/objects, or are they more like places that a self-appointed group thinks ought to be protected?
Of course many of them may be protected under a country’s own laws/planning, but in that case they would already qualify for protected_area anyway.
That’s a good question as well! But then we do have things like UNESCO. They are also a self-appointed group that doesn’t wield any power over-and-above the local authorities to actually protect anything. Except their brand. The protection titles of the World Heritage Sites are handled by the state and the municipalities.
But yeah, it’s a good question whether Docomomo should be treated as a legitimate cultural protection group. It is true that most (though not all) of the Docomomo sites in Finland, for example, are not protected in the City Plan or at the State level. A few (well, currently, roughly a third) are.
UNESCO has a treaty, enough in international diplomacy. Docomomo is a preservation advocacy. This needs to be justified, but it’s not =protected_area , only a third-party database and their rating.
Yeah, the background in tagging buildings protected in the City Plan colored my judgment. It’s true that perhaps the protect_class=* tag isn’t justified for these sites.
However, similarly to buildings protected in the City Plan, Docomomo sites do not usually have any on-the-ground-verifiable feature indicating this status[1] (aside from their appearance or architectural features, which were deemed worth preserving in the City Plan). UNESCO sites usually have a plaque with the World Cultural Heritage symbol. Again, similarly to e.g. UNESCO, Docomomo is an international expert organization (without any direct power to protect anything) that promotes certain select sites and buildings based on some nonarbirtary criteria. Therefore I think that there’s prima facie no reason not to add them to OSM as well.
Since some of the Docomomo sites are also protected by other titles, it’d be nice to have a tag that would work for both the protected and the nonprotected sites.
Would anybody object to a new sui generisdocomomo=yes tag, with a source:docomomo=* explainer? Of course, if anybody wants to start an ‘official’ proposal for another value, they’re welcome to do that!
Which is why also the protection status in the City Plan has to be added from a suitable source. The City Plan WMS-layer for Helsinki in Finland includes this information.The City even distributes it with a CC-BY 4.0 license. Which is incompatiable with ODbL. I’m sure that there are lots of good reasons why ODbL was chosen for OSM and I’m sure all the ramifications of that choice were thoroughly considered. I’m also sure that that’s the reason why the lawyers get the big bucks and I don’t. It would be laugh-out-loud funny if the effect weren’t so tragic: data under an open license naturallyisn’t usable in Open Street Map. The City’s perspective is that they have already opened up the data and aren’t therefore interested in signing waivers to serve the specifics of every little project, as the only thing they really care about is attribution. I cannot argue with that. So the only way to add this data is to find the actual decisions and decrees made by the City on a per building basis. ↩︎