Add icons to buildings based on type and other properties

[RudyTheDev]

82% of building= do not specify the type, but on the ground it can be a big difference. To encourage this tagging, I think buildings should always show the appropriate icons - house, apartments, garage, etc. Currently, a building has to have a name= for the label to appear or also have some sort of other tag. In reality, few buildings have names or special purposes. Before doing any PRs on this, I'd like to clarify the direction this can take.

What is iD's stance on (building and other feature) icons? Is there a reason buildings don't show icons by default while other (arguably, less useful) things do, like power?

Do the icons have to be black on red or can they be slightly different red on red to avoid visual noise for lesser importance icons and match the main color? Perhaps something closer like this (mockup):

->

It would also encourage tagging extra information if icons changed based on other tags, such as building:levels, for example (mockup):

[bhousel]

82% of building= do not specify the type, but on the ground it can be a big difference.

I actually don't really agree with this, but would be open to have my mind changed about it. As far as I can tell, nobody really cares what the building=* tag contains. The values are so fragmented and overly specific (house vs residential vs detached) that there is not much useful information that can be derived from them. Mappers are confused by the overwhelming choice of values, and data consumers only care about rendering buildings and don't care what the value contains.

What is iD's stance on (building and other feature) icons? Is there a reason buildings don't show icons by default while other (arguably, less useful) things do, like power?

It would really be drawing a lot of icons if we put them on every building. I think I did try it once, and I thought it looked silly. I agree that mapping the buildings is useful, but they are already consistently styled with red fill. Because the building tag is often combined with a better tag like amenity=, we'd rather show the user the icon for the better tag (and the red fill shows that it's a building).

Do the icons have to be black on red or can they be slightly different red on red to avoid visual noise for lesser importance icons and match the main color?

Changing the icon color adds visual noise. Now users have to mentally keep track of what icon colors mean. I think I'd rather just leave polygon fill color as the only color for now and leave the icons a consistent color.

It would also encourage tagging extra information if icons changed based on other tags, such as building:levels, for example (mockup):

Tagging building:levels would be useful, but I think it would be better to display that as a number. It should probably be an option that can be turned on and off.

[RudyTheDev]

[..] an option that can be turned on and off.

What would be the stance on adding "more icons" (or generally "more visuals") option disabled by default (so users like myself who want to micromap all the details can do so easier instead of clicking each one)? That should solve reduced accessibility for new users or inconvenience for users who aren't mapping such details and don't care for extra visuals.

I agree that in majority of cases the additional values are hardly useful to anyone. But I also think there are cases when they matter as the map becomes more complete. (Though I suppose same argument applies to every feature.)

Just a narrow example specific to my country and some others, but otherwise unmarked roads in apartment building courtyards are classified with special traffic rules (right of way, speed limit, parking rules, entry/exit rules). So much so that the distance from a nearby road where the area starts matters for traffic rules.

I think I did try it once, and I thought it looked silly. Now users have to mentally keep track of what icon colors mean.

I guess I implied the icon color matches the fill color and thus it stands out less. But, of course, I haven't actually seen how it looks with many icons at once.

[Adamant36]

There's currently an issue over on the maps Github page to rendering buildings based on type. Where major and minor buildings would be rendered differently. Outside of that, I can't think of anywhere else where specific building tags are used. Most of the time people don't even tag retail, commercial, or residential buildings as such. Let alone do they use some of the more obscure building tags. So id agree most people don't care about it. I don't really blame them. As it is, building tagging is way over complicated. Especially for new mappers.

[matthewdarwin]

I am strongly in favor of adding the common building types to the UI. In Canada we are running a project where we are going to add many buildings into the map. We want mappers with less experience (aka not JOSM users) to be able to add useful tags to buildings (type and address ideally). Having the building type is important for statistics later. (The Red Cross in Canada uses OSM buildings to understand impact of flooding/fires/etc).

In Ottawa, Canada most buildings have more information than just building=yes. (~36K/307K or 11% are building=yes)

[bhousel]

It would really be drawing a lot of icons if we put them on every building. I think I did try it once, and I thought it looked silly.

I tried it again, and I still think this looks kind of silly:

Maybe we can think of a different way to encourage users to tag more things about buildings. I'd be open to the idea of having a different mode in iD that is just for building editing and drawing.

[RudyTheDev]

What about a fill pattern?

In practice, I would say to not show it by default, so buildings stand out as "empty":

[bhousel]

What about a fill pattern?

I really don't like it, sorry. It's just really hard to see, and I don't think most users would understand what it's for.

[RudyTheDev]

Fair enough.

What would be the stance on adding a menu like the "Map Features" but for specific visuals? I image all intrusive items being disabled by default, so users like myself who want to micromap all the details can enable what they want. That should solve reduced accessibility for new users or inconvenience for users who aren't mapping such details and don't care for extra visuals. In fact, I would also love to occasionally disable some stuff, like name tags.

• [ ] Building types
• [ ] House numbers
• [X] Names
• [ ] Layers
• [ ] Access
• [ ] Possibilities
• [ ] Are Endless etc.

[jidanni]

Here is a market where even just a mouseover on each point would save clicking each one to find out if it was number 20, or 22 or 24, etc.

[1ec5]

This discussion is specifically about displaying an icon on each building area. Your example is about labeling an address point with a unit number, which you already filed as #8744.

[Busterama452]

Is there any way to be on notification when there's an update that adds some indicator to a building that it has an address property filled out. Without that in place, I can no longer efficiently use Rapid add building with their addresses. I'd rather just hold off until something is available to help me figure out which buildings I've added addresses to already vs buildings that I need to add the address.

Is there any way to use the older version in the mean time?