NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum

Hi

Note: This is a very common scenario, so I was sure that it must have been documented already. But despite trying different search terms, I could not find an answer. My apologies if this is already covered!

Problem: Bangalore has many commercial high-rise buildings. Each building houses a large number of company offices. Often each floor has multiple offices.

We cannot insert points for each office, because of the following problems:

  1. It is impossible to show vertically stacked offices. For example, in a 20-floor building, there will be 20 offices stacked vertically. All their POI points would appear at the same spot on OSM.

  2. If I stagger the placement of the points, they would show the POI at the wrong place in the building's plan. Secondly, even if I stagger the position, the footprint of the building is not large enough to accommodate all POIs.

How to avoid cluttering the map and yet make it browsable+searchable?

Also, if I have a table of these POIs (e.g. Name, type of business, floor number), is there a short method to import them all at once and convert them into POIs?

Please help!

asked 16 Oct '15, 06:39

NarayanAras's gravatar image

NarayanAras
3115818
accept rate: 0%

edited 16 Oct '15, 06:50

One point: there is actually nothing wrong with stacking POIs if they occupy the same geographical co-ordinates. All it means is that they will be awkward to edit and make rendering of the information unlikely.

(16 Oct '15, 12:20) SK53 ♦

There is a project OpenLevelUp!, which uses OSM data and tries to provide an indoor rendering for multiple levels

(25 Oct '15, 17:00) escada

Honest answer: There is, at present, no good way to represent the individual tenants/offices in large buildings in OSM. There have been many proposals about how best to handle this (for instance, indoor mapping and challenges for indoor maps), but there is no consensus. OSM has always struggled with mapping things which are vertically stacked, and while we're managing things like bridges and tunnels quite nicely, it's not feasible to extend this approach to more than 2 or 3 layers (let alone 20+ layers).

I would recommend to, for the moment:

  • Tag the building itself (probably with building=commercial)
  • Tag its address and/or name
  • Tag the entrances
  • Perhaps tag the building' height

If you feel so inclined, participate in the discussions around how best to handle this case in OSM (although keep in mind that this may be a case where the information about building tenants/offices should not go into the main OSM database, but into a different service).

permanent link

answered 16 Oct '15, 08:33

Lightsider's gravatar image

Lightsider
1.5k52129
accept rate: 42%

I checked out the indoor mapping links, thanks!

But the site seems to be down: I could not check out the prototype (a polish airport).

But I came across a Google example: @12.9375131,77.6279375,20.25z">https://www.google.co.in/maps/@12.9375131,77.6279375,20.25z

This shows floor-wise layout of a mall. (A floor-selector scale pops up next to the building, so that we can choose the desired floor).

This feature is available in Android app (Google Maps) as well.

It would be fantastic to have this feature in OSM.

(25 Oct '15, 05:52) NarayanAras
Your answer
toggle preview

Follow this question

By Email:

Once you sign in you will be able to subscribe for any updates here

By RSS:

Answers

Answers and Comments

Markdown Basics

  • *italic* or _italic_
  • **bold** or __bold__
  • link:[text](http://url.com/ "title")
  • image?![alt text](/path/img.jpg "title")
  • numbered list: 1. Foo 2. Bar
  • to add a line break simply add two spaces to where you would like the new line to be.
  • basic HTML tags are also supported

Question tags:

×252
×181
×1

question asked: 16 Oct '15, 06:39

question was seen: 4,745 times

last updated: 25 Oct '15, 17:00

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum