Hi! I’m quite new to editing so this may have been asked before.
When mapping a building should you add all the details to the building like address, business name, contact information to the polygon or to a separate point? I’ve been seeing a lot of both of them which one is the correct way? I’ve also been mapping the address to the building and then adding a point with the business onto a point.
Mapping POIs and Buildings separately with buildings having addrsss
Either is fine. Nodes can be easier as you don’t need to split the building at each shop (e.g. a terrace of shops). Mapping as areas can be useful to tag entrances.
Where a business is the sole occupier of the building, like a shop in a retail park (with shared parking), then having all the tags on the building outline is fine.
If the business has its own car park, outdoor seating, etc., you might want to put the business tags on a polygon surrounding the building and other facilities. Using the “OSMUK Cadastral Parcels” overlay in the iD editor can help with this.
If it’s the common case of a business on the ground floor of a building, with flats or offices above, then it’s probably easier to add the business as a POI node, with level=0 to indicate that it’s on the ground floor. Having the address tags on both is fine, as data consumers will not assume that a node within a building polygon inherits tags from it. You can also add separate entrance nodes to the building polygon, typically entrance=shop and entrance=staircase. If the staircase entrance has a different address, e.g. number 42A for building 42, a full set of address tags can be added to it.
For the last case, you can use 3D mapping and add a building:part=retail polygon (with address tags) for the part of the building occupied by the business. This is quite time consuming and often overkill.
It’s also worth noting that in some areas, local mappers prefer to put the address tags on either an entrance node on the building polygon, or an unconnected node within the polygon, rather than on the building outline.
