Hi, let me describe one of these in particular that I think you most refer to (220042578), and maybe you can suggest the better way to proceed.

There is one university building which awkwardly is drawn as several overlapping regions. One region reflects the footprint of one wing of the building, another reflects a portion of the building that doesn't reach ground at all, as it covers a park-like area; and one region is the union of these two. The only entrances are to the first of the above regions from under the second. Yet, searching for this "building" should reach the third region.

What is the best practice for labeling in a situation like this? And in particular in a way that does not over-complicate the search programs to reach entrances?

I appreciate your comments and would like to find the slick way forward on this, thanks.

Thanks for that. Likely could be useful if extend or port these tools moving forward. Too bad not available back in the day when we were spinning this up!

Feel free to get with me directly sometime if you'd like to have a deeper conversation about what we do in TerpNav and the algorithms deployed using these OSM data. - Jim

Yes, place_number is a tag on map elements that let us integrate the items with higher level operations in TerpNav. These tags are on all (most I hope) items on College Park campus and we have used them for years with success. The name was chosen to be something to which other tools are agnostic, and have been more enduring for us since identifiers in the base set (which otherwise might have been more logical choices) would change out from under us from time to time. Does this help answer your question? - Jim
https://terpnav.umd.edu/map/