I want to tag a single house (a historic house standing in the middle of agricultural land) so that it appears on the map. I put the waypoint on the map and tagged it as landuse=residential and name=Blakemount House but it didn’t appear at all in Osmarender. So then, having learned yesterday in this forum that landuse must be an area I put a little area around the waypoint and tagged that in the same way, i.e.landuse=residential, name=Blakemount House . It now appears in Osmarender just as the name but without any symbol to show its approximate position.
How does one tag a single house in such a way that it appears with a house symbol and its name ? I’ve read and re-read the Tags section in the Wiki but cannot find the solution.
You could try adding building=yes and name=… to the node that indicates where the house is and see if it renders, however the map features page says that the building key needs to be an area. IMO you shouldn’t add the building name to the landuse area.
Tag building=[anything] given for an area gets rendered with both Mapnik and Osmarender. Fill colour is always the same, but some day somebody will probably make city map styles which are rendering buildings with different colours according to the building tag. Lots of single and multipolygon buildings can be seen here: http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=60.1634&lon=24.94916&zoom=15&layers=B000FTF
Thanks to you both for these rapid answers. Greatly appreciated.
Sorry to be obtuse, but what is the ‘anything’ in ‘building=[anything]’ ? Would that be the name of the building (e.g. ‘Aetna Insurance House’) or is it the type of building (e.g. ‘dwelling house’ or ‘hangar’ or ‘barn’) ?
P.S. That map of a town is very impressive indeed. How were the buildings delineated ? Did the author walk round them with a GPS or were they traced from an aerial photo ?
Sorry to revive this, but just to clarify:
I live in an old town with many big buildings - churches and the like. Would it then be fitting to have someone GPS track the walls for submission?
Ofcouse you can try to do this, but GPS receiption is difficult in the ‘urban canyon’ resulting in bad tracks. GPS signal reflections, blocking out of large parts of the sky cause these anomalies. The result is that just walking around a building won’t paint a nice and tight picture of the buildings outlines. That’s why I said that ‘Most buildings are traced from aerial photo’s’.
If they are fairly clean squares, I could just grab the four corners?
I am just asking because the aerial photos of my town are very low-resolution and not really fit for that kind of work.
If you can’t get gps fix beside the building you can try to record a pointer on a more open area, a short line that continues the wall. It may be impossible to find open place in old town, though. But then you can just measure a few anchor points and sketch the rest with free hand to resemble what you see and became OSM landscape painter. The result can be very satisfactory.
Seriously; doing an approximation is probably the best way, adding a small note about low accuracy of the buildings placement. But Church buildings are hard to map with GPS even if you are out in the countryside, because they block the GPS signal so effectively.
Though this is nothing a 20m long stick can’t solve. I wish there where portable sticks this length.
I found myself the other day thinking of using two waypoints with compass bearings to more accurately locate a currently estimated lighthouse off the coast of Dovercourt. I then wondered how accurately I can read a compass and whether this is getting too close to proper surveying. Bring on the theodolites…
