I’ve recently been tring with varying degrees of success to begin mapping area shapes of highways and more doors, walls, hedges and fences in various locations and have also attempted level [-tag] seperated indoor tags for adding addresses to multi-occupier sites like residential blocks [housing towers] and mixed retail and housing buildings with distinct 3D splits {vertically and hoizontaly}. This has led me to try adding info about the floor and roof arangements of some buildings I’ve been working on {see wikki pages about building_levels and roof types etc for more info in this type of tagging}.

When I visited The national goverment mapping agency for Great Britain Ordnance Survey I found that there examples of public mapping on the page:- https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/index.html [click to public if not automatic comming up right] I was pleased to see that the lower half of the page had a big section about the profesionaly made map of OS Mastermap Topography Layer as the top product with a lovely equvalent of a building outline with individualy numbered flats/houses built by a old posibly defence wall [there seem to be blankly marked turrets and larger building stucture built withen the walls but unattached that is marked as split into different parts now. the sidewalks and footwatways are [in OSM terms] areaised [, not just as lines [ways]].

clicking on find out more button took me to the page about it from the business and goverment section. Way down at the bottom of the page three features that reminded me things I’ve seen described in the OSM wikki manual and what I’d been trying to add too. They site boundries and entrances, Unique property referanceing though (I was going for the country specfic (NPLG)[http://www.nlpg.org.uk] scheme and they used there original TOID scheme which is a cross between the data element ids OSM uses to number ways, ref’s and nodes and something more object orintated [ie one for the whole stucture not just each point and line that may be needed to show it), and also a section talking about some thing fairly new that they are doing to measure the hights of buildings and heights of rooftops this is really intresting to me as it is something that people have requesting in various ways from OSM (I think for a lot of 3D presentaion and simulation uses. I found it good that the national mapping agency is seeing that they may actually be a different kind of market for this level of detail than they trditionaly pitched it to. I have been intrested in detailed maps for a long time which explins why I contribute, but it is the first time I seen this shift which is really encourageing as I would love to pay modestly for this kind of data done with garenteed accuracy but domsticly it used to unafforable to me so thats why I came to OSM to work a cheap and chearful alternative. but with ofset, parralax and and other complications in the areaisation process its still going to take a=while for OSM to reach global covage with similar accuracy (but with good pre-aligned basepictures and 3D image tracing added to the editor…)

I like and respect the work that my National mapping agency do. and would happily do direct survey work for them if they contacted me about such,. So I’m happy to see they are adapting to what they are seeing that people might want from domestic large coverage digital mapping. -Govanus