My new local library building was just announced as being built to an energy-saving certification, PHIUS. I’m also aware of buildings with LEED certification. Is anyone aware of a way to tag buildings built to these certifications? I believe it would be good to capture this information going forward.
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How is this property verifiable?
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This kind of information is often posted on the building itself (plaque, sign, sticker, etc.) or shared on the feature’s website. Depending on the certification, it may also be published by the organization in charge of the certification or in government documents / databases.
Thanks!
What is the advantage or use case of also tagging this information in OSM rather than only in a database like Wikidata?
To physically verify the rating, you generally need to get everyone out of the building, close all doors and windows or put a covering screen over them with a measured opening hole size, then measure how the air moves in/out of the intentional opening holes you left.
This frequently reveals that the actual insulation and the as-designed insulation have some differences 
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To me the advantage is to be able to see how areas are improving over time. With geospatial data we can count the number of these types of buildings. Wikidata is nice but it doesn’t tell us where impact is most noticable.
Edit: just now saw that you are in the data working group, so my post is probably more catered towards someone new to OSM. 
I looked at taginfo and there currently doesn’t seem to be anything well established.
The closest thing I could find was a generic building:energy_standard=* with 213 uses. There are also 2 uses of leed=* (1 silver; 1 platinum).
So I think you gave 2 options.
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just invent your own tag, tag it to the buildings you know and call it good
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try to create a tagging scheme together with the community and try to document and formalize it
Second one takes quite a lot more effort and dedication but would be most beneficial for OpenStreetMap because you can try and build the scheme in a way that allows other certification standards to be added (like the European Passive House Institute certification).
To get started I’d recommend creating a list of (maybe in the wiki or first here in the thread) that will collect the certification standards that are available and which levels they have (found the PHIUS website quite confusing on mobile).
At the moment, neither OSM nor Wikidata has nearly enough coverage of green building certification systems to be able to analyze geographic patterns. With greater awareness among contributors, I do think both projects could significantly increase coverage of green building certifications, but an authoritative source is probably always going to outpace either project.
OSM’s coverage is very low and also fragmented across a variety of tags. Including basic parsing of note=* and description=*, I can only find 10 buildings tagged with some indication of LEED certification. (For my part, I’ve tagged an apartment building in my neighborhood as leed=silver based on the plaque by the entrance.) OSM’s coverage is likely to be limited because LEED-certified buildings aren’t required to post their certification prominently.
Wikidata only has 65 buildings tagged with a coordinate and any level of LEED certification. In the long run, Wikidata has the advantage of welcoming information from published sources, but it also may be limited by its notability rules. If necessary, Sophox and QLever are both capable of federated queries between OSM and Wikidata, so it isn’t a problem if some of the building items on Wikidata lack coordinates.
A more realistic use case might be an application like OsmAnd or CoMaps labeling any search result that has a green building certification, so you can feel a little better about planning a trip to the building.
If LEED is to be tagged, BREAM should also be considered. Both are environmental scoring systems, but have different criteria. BREAM has many more assessed projects, but I expect that LEED is more common in th US.
Both are run by private organisations. Someone who is interested in mapping this data might be able to contact them for refeence data sets. It may be worth noting that a project can have a BREAM certification and never be built.
With 16k uses there is
I suggest to use one common tag for all kinds of certification and to use subkeys for each type.
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LEED and BREEAM has all the environmental impacts, not only energy. The latter further includes health, wellbeing, and comfort.
There are problems with the last proposed method in the format and scope Proposal:Certification - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Respectfully, having been a member of the Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC) and having personally worked on the documentation for many LEED projects in the past 20 years, I think this is not something that ought to be incorporated into the OSM data itself. If the CaGBC, USGBC or some other third-party wanted to make a LEED project map using OSM as their base, that’s fine. However, there is so much more to these “green building” rating systems than a simple certification level or ‘grade’, and to comprehensively parse this information is something that even a sophisticated mapper probably won’t understand unless they’re involved in the building construction industry.
I’ll write about LEED because it’s the only one I’m very familiar with, and it’s far and away the most popular of these rating systems in North America (and it’s not even close). There isn’t just one LEED rating system, there are in point of fact dozens of types of certifications. The core categories are:
- Building Design and Construction (BD+C)
- Interior Design and Construction (ID+C)
- Residential BD+C
- Operations and Maintenance (O+M)
- Neighbourhood Development (ND)
- Cities
- Communities
Within these core categories are many subcategories. A new building does not merely apply for a “LEED BD+C” certification, you apply for the particular type of project you’re doing. There are subcategories of ratings, each of which has slightly different “credit points” and scoring criteria. These include Schools, Retail, Healthcare, Data Centres, Hospitality, Warehouses and Distribution Centres, Homes, and Multifamily Midrise buildings. The most popular is “LEED BD+C New Construction”, which is a more generic one that covers the new construction of buildings outside the scope of aforementioned. There is also a subcategory called “Core and Shell”, the scope of which only covers the construction of the core of a building. Think for example of an office tower: the building by its very nature is meant to accommodate a multitude of tenants who occupy their own suites, and who may do generally whatever the heck they’d like with their own space when they develop it (what we call “fitting out”). The developers of office buildings would often pursue a LEED BD+C Core and Shell certification to certify the base-building, but would not include the fit-out of any of the occupied floors.
No matter what tagging scheme one might come up with, when you see a LEED plaque in a building lobby you would need to understand the differences between these systems to be able to properly tag something in OSM. Frankly I think it’s nowhere near enough to just slap some sort of leed=silver(e.g.) tag on a building object in OSM when you see a plaque in a lobby. You really need to understand what it’s for.
I’ll give you a real-world example of a project I personally worked on. (I’ll spare some details to keep a modicum of personal anonymity. ) It was a new office tower, attached to an existing one. The lower storeys of the building were being fit out concurrently with the construction of the new tower; the upper storeys were developed afterward. The developer pursued LEED certification not under the LEED BD+C New Construction or Core and Shell rating systems; rather, we went after a LEED ID+C Commercial Interiors certification for the tenant fit-out of the bottom half of the building. That meant that the scope of the LEED certification did NOT include any of the construction of the underlying building itself, it only included the fit-out of a few floors of the building. We got ‘Gold’, and there was a plaque in that building’s main entry lobby proudly displayed, but a layman passing by almost certainly wouldn’t understand that that plaque was only for the tenant spaces on four floors. Tagging the entire building way in OSM with a leed=goldtag would be misleading.
Building owners can also ‘recertify’ their buildings under the Operations and Maintenance category, so a building that originally achieved one rating under the BD+C category could get a better rating through a recertification under the O+M criteria. Double-checking the CaGBC project database this afternoon I found that three buildings I worked on the new construction of—and which received no better than a BD+C Core and Shell ‘Silver’ or ‘Gold’ in the first place—had recertified in the last few years as ‘Platinum’ under the O+M criteria. I’m sure the old plaques have been relegated to the dustbin and the newer ‘Platinum’ ones are in their place, but technically these were two separate certifications.
A tagging system that could incorporate all of the intricacies of the LEED certifications would be so onerous to use accurately that I very sincerely doubt it would see any use by mappers at large.
I also disagree in principle with adding a tagging scheme that would be used essentially for commercial advertisement.
Finally, I would not only be reticent to add LEED certifications to the OSM data for the aforementioned reasons but frankly I also question the continuing relevance of LEED and other such rating systems in the first place. My professional experience is such that its prevalence is quickly diminishing. Few new builds bother to pursue certification; literally only three new buildings in my city of 1.7M+ people received LEED BD+C certifications this year (plus one expansion to an existing facility) whereas in years past it was dozens, and it’s not for a lack of building activity in the city.
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I appreciate your professional opinion. Speaking for my own motivation in tagging leed=silver, I saw a plaque that appeared to pertain to the building, so I tagged the building with the information on the plaque. In many ways this is like seeing ☆☆☆ on a hotel sign and mapping it, not really trying to evaluate the veracity of that information.
If your suggestion is to instead map the sign, I would gladly oblige. (Though the obvious option of historical=memorial memorial=plaque would seem to be an overstatement.) I certainly don’t expect anyone to analyze this tag as part of a geographic distribution analysis or derive much other meaning from the sign.
Ay there’s the rub! A passerby sees a LEED plaque in a building lobby, presumes it applies to the building, and tags it with leed=silver. I can totally see why a well-meaning contributor would do so, but it doesn’t capture the full story! It could be that the building has certification under Core and Shell, or maybe only parts of the building were certified under Commercial Interiors, or maybe an expansion to the building was certified under New Construction, or maybe it’s just for their O&M program. They all mean different things, really.
That example project I mentioned obviously didn’t include the existing, interconnected tower next door to the new one I worked on. The “LEED boundary” was very carefully chosen to exclude it. You might walk by and see the plaque in the building and tag it with leed=gold, and I can see why a reasonable person would do so, but I know for fact it’s just for the 2nd-5th floors of the new side because we never would have got any certification if we included the 45-year-old POS next door! 
And I didn’t even begin to get into the intricacies of which version of LEED the project may have been certified under. The system has been revised multiple times, they’re up to version 5 this year. A Silver achieved under v1.0 is quite different from a Silver under v4.1.
@hoserab Thanks for the detailed information on LEED buildings. I know of one built not far from where I lived in Seattle, Brooks Sports. It is not tagged as a LEED building in OSM. I’ll defer to your knowledge and not pursue a certification tag. I do think that at some point in the future, it would be beneficial to have that knowledge, but since the standards are constantly changing, it doesn’t make sense to pursue it now.l
Doing a search I see that business is in a building at 3400 Stone Way. Looking it up in the USGBC’s database, the building was (and maybe still is?) called “Stone 34”, and was certified Platinum under BD+C Core and Shell when it was built in 2015 (using the LEED version 2009 scoring system), and then was certified and recertified under O+M multiple times since. Since its original “Platinum” O+M certification in 2015 it has had progressively worse scores over the years; 2021’s recertification had dropped to “Gold”, and if it has another slip in credit points like it did from 2021 to 2024 it’ll fall to “Silver” next time. At which point, if it’s like other buildings I’ve done work on over the years, the building owners will simply ignore the last score they got and never bother recertifying again.
Assuming you wanted to tag these certifications, it begs the question how you would. leed:bd+c:cs=platinumfor the original certification? Every successive O+M recertification really ought to be dated, so something like leed:o+m=platinum @ 2015, leed:o+m=gold @ 2024(and so on for all the other years’ recertifications in between)? The minutiae gets pretty absurd pretty quickly, but this is exactly what I mean about a tag like leed=platinumor whatever being inadequate.
As I wrote before, if the USGBC wanted to build a map showing LEED project locations using OSM as its base: cool. Tagging buildings/shops/offices/neighbourhoods within OSM itself? Kinda promotional BS that we as OSM users shouldn’t ham-fist into the underlying map data.
Someone else mentioned BREEAM certification. I’m not super-familiar with it, other than a passing knowledge that it exists; in North America it tends to be thought of as “the British LEED”. I do know enough to know it has almost exactly the same sorts of categories of certification as LEED, and therefore will run into the same sorts of tagging issues I’ve already raised.
Are you thinking advertising=sign or something of that nature?
For a view from the other side of the Atlantic, all buildings constructed, sold or rented out anywhere in the UK or EU are required by law to have their energy performance assessed. There are various methodologies in use but they all result in a letter rating (A, B, C, ..). At least in the UK the registers are public so you can look up the energy performance of many buildings, including private houses and apartments. The licence won’t be suitable for import, and we wouldn’t dream of mapping this, the certificates are not usually physically displayed.
@mueschel mentioned a tag energy_class which has 16k uses, but almost all of them are in Russia. It would be interesting if there are different cultural conventions around energy efficiency ratings in Russia (e.g. if they are more commonly publicly displayed). From a look around some of the changesets, the tag seems to be added as part of an organised editing activity that uses Maproulette, possibly an import from government data.
- Please avoid creating more top level tags that are just inscrutable acronyms.
- To make that data actually useful for that purpose, you’ll also need to tag the start/construction date of those buildings. The date when the energy certification was tagged in OSM doesn’t actually give you any useful time information.
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No, I meant that adding tags for LEED certifications is in and of itself OSM advertising the program for the USGBC/CaGBC/etc. It’s like tagging restaurants and hotels with ratings from a CAA/AAA TripTik® book. In principle I think it’s wrong for OSM to perpetuate these sorts of third-party ratings systems.