Very much the same way you tell a hotel or dormitory apart. There is a building serving as nursing home. It is new and fits the purpose. Normally no problem to enter at least the reception area to have a look. The surrounding garden fits the purpose. If you are still in doubt you can simply ask the staff if the building probably was a university or a fitness_center earlier. It’s as simple as that and the same procedure for a lot of other building tags which are documented in the wiki and in use since long. And if you don’t have time to take a closer look you can still check the operators website lateron. They will proudly tell you about the new constructed buildings they are operating for the benefit of the society.
… so we should stop using these well documented tags and go for something like building=serviced_apartment as generic tag for all of them?
But that’s all not related to the building=*. What makes a hotel-building unique from a nursing home or a dormitory? For sure the function is different. But that’s part of all function-specifc tags.
Some kind of reception you might have at serviced apartments, hotels, nursing homes, assisted living… Hall ways with dedicated rooms/suites all the above have as well. Common areas as well. Why should we have multiple values for the same thing.
“It is new and fits the purpose” is very much building related. If it is knew one can assume it has been built for the purpose. If it is old it has probably been built for another puropose and was converted to a nursing home lateron.
I don’t mind to have a catch-all tag for all those buildings incorporating different kinds of residential rooms, serviced or not, a reception, staff rooms and offices, common rooms, probably medical treatment rooms, recreational rooms, probably a indoor pool etc. and I will be happy to use it for nursing-homes if at the same time we deprecate all of the tags which are in use for such kinds of buildings at present.
On the other hand I also do not see a problem in using dedicated tags for buildings of similar construction but designed for different purposes. We have lots of such tags in use already and I still see no reason why we should not do the same for nursing homes.
I see nothing dubious with kindergarten, school, hotel, apartments, university, commercial or civic as building types. Some are very generic (commercial, civic), others a little more specific (university) and the rest quite specific (kindergarten, school, hotel, apartments).
Personally, I prefer more specific values because the generic type is then implied, while you can’t get a detailed value from a generic one. For universities, there are lots of different building types with different structures and requirements according to the use and faculty, e.g. laboratories, administrative areas, hospitals, lecture rooms, lecture halls / theatre, libraries, refectories, which sometimes are combined and sometimes in specialized buildings. “building=university” fits them all, also those with mixed use, but if a building only has lecture halls, or refectories, or is a university library, it is IMHO better to indicate this precise type rather than a generic “university” (provided you know of course).
To give another example: a fire station has very specific requirements (e.g. a tower to dry the hoses, a lot of garages with direct exit to the street, …) and while it could be tagged as building=civic, it would be better to use building=fire_station because it gives more relevant information.
retagging building=residential to building=apartments (provided this is the case) is beneficial, while the change in the reverse direction would be a degradation.
A nursing home may superficially seem similar to an apartment building, but it has significantly differring requirements, like much wider corridors, larger elevators, more elevators, usually has rooms rather than apartments, has much stricter requirements for fire protection (compartimentation, evacuation areas, …), it has requirements for storage (medication, laundry), an industrial kitchen (sometimes, or get the food externally), changing rooms, community areas, …
In some way it is more similar to a hospital than to an apartment building. IMHO a dedicated building value is ok.
So a building=nursing_home will at least have two elevators which fits a bed and all (?) interior doors are wide enough to fit a bed?
If you want to add information regarding fire resistance or any other regulations, I suggest not to mix those into building tag, as they are temporary. The building itself doesn’t change if any kind of permit is missing.
No, I think the requirement has been repeated quite a few times now. The building has been built to be a nursing home.
That’s the requirement. People have then listed attributes these buildings might typically have (at least in the areas they’re personally familiar with), but those are not the requirement.
If you want to propose the removal of a number of established building values, maybe you could start that as a new thread. But I don’t think its fair to use that viewpoint as an argument against a single value, if you don’t actually pursue it properly.
One major aspect is accessibility. Since they’re intended for the elderly, hallways will often have rails lining the entire building, units with wide doors, wheelchair accommodations everywhere. A student dormitory or serviced apartment wouldn’t have these. A hospital might have these, but a nursing homes wouldn’t have many of the other features of a hospital such as x-ray rooms, operating rooms, etc.
My main question isn’t about other building= , but =nursing_home vs other social_facility==group_home , =hospice , and =assisted_living without building=
They have the same accessibility too?
Maybe. I’m a bit iffy on how the English terms and the connotations native speakers have of them map to local concepts. Googling assisted living suggested some kind of a resort-like experience.
My grandmother was provided ”assisted living services” in her own home before her memory was so gone she had to be moved to a nursing home.
I live near a facility for hearing impaired that has been tagged assisted_living but I have no idea if that’s even right, or if group_home would be more accurate.
I don’t feel strongly about having a different building values for each of the slightly differently targeted facilities in this general sphere of things, but I do think that a value other than yes would be reasonable. And these are not normal residential buildings, nor are they hospitals, hotels etc.
If a single umbrella term would be more palatable, it should ideally not be one strongly associated with a specific type of facility. Perhaps “Long-term care (facility)” would work? Not an OSMism, there’s prior art :)
The other problem is what I asked about =dormitory : Do different people sleep in the same room (may be frowned upon but common), or they have their own rooms making it closer to co-living flats mostly =apartments? Co-living might not be seen as “normal residential” either. So we need to consider how much does building= need to reflect the internal architecture more than the use.
Around me, many of the buildings in use as nursing homes were purpose built as nursing homes. Historically there were conversions of other buildings, but as time goes on these are replaced by purpose built nursing homes. This won’t be the case everywhere, but it doesn’t mean that these purpose built nursing homes do not exist as a building type. Most are mapped as building=yes (which is not wrong, but is less accurate than it could be). They do have descriptive amenity tags corresponding to their current use.
Over time some may get used as something else, but that won’t change that they were built as a nursing home.
Residential care seemed to be used synonymously with assisted living, but I would defer to native speakers on this.
A dorm, as the word is normally used, can be shared rooms but it doesn’t need to be. I shared the room when I lived in a dorm, but we had futons instead of bunk beds I’ve been to a grad student dorm that was essentially normal apartments.
Of course if we were to say that dormitory always means shared rooms, we’d then have to ask how that’s different from barracks… ah, this has been pre-empted in the wiki
But I generally don’t like the idea of using words strongly associated with a specific context for something completely different in OSM.
So it’s just the intention of the builder? So like someone in his 60’s is building a new single-family house (with all the elderly-friendly-stuff) for himself, his wife and a flat for a private nurse. That building would be a building=nursing_home, not a building=detached?
Same like a nursing home build in the 1950’s without all the elderly-friendly stuff would be a building=nursing_home, just because back then it was intended to be one? Like this one: https://oeschberg-der-lebensort.ch/
You confuse me. Above you wrote it’s about the intention. Now the intention is not enough you need elevators and the like. So back to my previous question: Use of building=nursing_home - #28 by aighes
Maybe you guys should first discuss the definition what exactly a building=nursing_home is and then we can discuss again, whether it’s worth to define this tag.
Surely we could group all kinds of buildings serving similar purposes under one more generic tag like building=residential_care and get rid of the existing
That is one option. The other option is to accept the differences and use more specific tags. If you have ever been in a nursing home and a group home you will be aware of the differences in the intererior architecture. Group homes do not require the same installations than nursing homes.
A hospice is a nursing home with some special tasks only. No separate tag needed for those imo.
Buildings for assisted living are very close to apartment buildings. There are minor differences but the apartment structure is quite dominant there. I would not mind to tag them as apartments but if someone prefers building=assisted_living for a purpose built assisted living home I would not argue about that.
Another solution could be a hierarchical tagging with building=residential_care as main tag and residential_care=nursing_home/group_home/assisted_living as subtags but I would not favour that.
A building constructed as dormitory (described in the wiki) qualifies for building=dormitory. It does not matter if the people living there do so in large rooms with lots of beds or if everyone has his own room. It is the purpose which leads to the tag.
The boundary between a dormitory and apartment for me would be the sharing of amenities. If bathrooms or kitchens are shared between several suites, then it is almost certainly a dorm rather than an apartment. Whether people share a room or not isn’t much of a factor because all that would require is a bunk bed. If a dormitory provided by an institution could pass for normal apartments if it wasn’t operated by that institution, then I would tag it as building=apartments with amenity=student_accommodation.
I’ve been to a grad student dorm that was essentially normal apartments.