Edinburgh’s map is looking very full. I started doing building editing when I moved here, but now there’s not much to add, so I’ve started to add some building:levels tags in areas I walk through regularly.

An academic project, Mapping Edinburgh’s Social History has been doing a lot of work enhancing Edinburgh map, in particular adding addresses that will allow geocoding without postcodes, which only take you back as far as 1971. One of the MESH mappers, eric_, must be hawkishly watching the map, saw a recent batch of my edits and suggested that I start adding in roof:levels and building:material “but no pressure!”

While i’m into doing this if it has value to others and i’m surveying anyway, I have my doubts about building interpretation in a city full of architectural idiosyncracies such as Edinburgh. One is, what happens when the top storey of a building is embedded within a roof, like this?

You can see from the side of the building that the roof storey is not an add-on or an afterthought, that the side facade is genuinely five storeys high, so i’m really not sure whether to model this as building:levels=5 or building:levels=4 and roof:levels=1

The advantage of using the levels is that they’re easy to observe and record without any special surveying equipment (and yes i have thought about trying to use ultrasound with an arduino to take measurements of building heights in metres, but that wouldn’t give that much more accuracy value than building:levels alone.

Then of course in a mixed-style European city we often get scenarios like this, where an older high-ceilinged building is built next to a modern, low-budget low-ceilinged building: this shows adjacent buildings as part of the Summerhall complex:

Any thoughts from other local mappers would be appreciated. What i want to get out of this personally are some simple, impressionistic “haptic maps” using a 3D printer or maybe plaster cast into a mould. I’m not personally worried about precision, more curious to see what drops out of the existing tools, so building:levels are generally enough for me (and well supported by amazing tools like osm2world and osmbuildings.org.