OSM Indoor Meeting 2025-12-03

Upcoming Events

Should we have another in-person workshop (ie. a new iteration of Arbeitstreffen_Indoor_OSM_2022)? Separate event or attached to one of the OSM Hack Weekends? Goal would be to work on resolving open tagging schema issues and updating the wiki documentation to match the current reality and community consensus.
OSM wiki change review

Frank presents the current proposal: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:Allow_area%3Dyes_for_indoor%3Dwall
Challenge: transiton between thick and thin wall mapping, thin walls with width would need to be inset by half the width to be placed correctly: we don't have a good solution for this
Thin walls can/should be made explicit (on areas with implicit walls) when extra tags are needed on the wall (e.g. material).
Should thick walls be tagged explicitly at all, or implicitly defined by not being in an area/room? Consensus seems to be towards explicit tagging, as untagged areas could also have other reasons.
Thin wall mapping remains perfectly fine, the thick wall model is for cases where that's not good enough.
Relation to indoor=column? That's not an agreed SIT tag yet.
- What's the implied shape of node-based columns? Can be explicitly tagged though column:shape=*
- We don't want a default, but rather a strong suggestion to explicitly tag the shape
- Separate tagging of columns makes sense, e.g. for a11y semantic presentation
Relation to man_made=column? That's not primarily a building part.

Proposal: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:Detailed_indoor_stairs_mapping2
Mostly documents the common practice of stair mapping using highway=steps with level tags.
Also introduces fractional levels, which aren't official yet.
Possible extension: mention that the full stairs extend can also be drawn as an area in addition (same as it's the case for outdoor)
barrier=steps part not included yet, for very wide steps. barrier=step exists though (but uncommon), so a series of those could work (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:barrier%3Dstep) - also an unsolved problem for outdoor though
For outdoor we have no way to model landings, should the indoor tagging be generalized for that?
Where to draw the line between landings and steps?

What makes a (fractional) level? Ie. how much of a height difference needs to be? just a few steps are probably not enough (see eg. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:20251203_115218.jpg)
Alternative approach: base level + incremental height difference
Local signage/labeling e.g. in elevators could be one criteria for splitting levels

This is currently not done, so far building owners mostly asked for that not to be done.
There's no tagging models so far.

Merging lists of example buildings from SIT and Indoor mapping pages
- https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Simple_Indoor_Tagging#Tagging_examples
- https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Indoor_Mapping#Examples
- Examples from DE could also use updates, e.g. TU Dresden and KIT Karlsruhe are missing
Clarifying the level range vs level sets semantics
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:indoor%3Darea - indoor=area: Clarify that this describes a physical space without implied walls, rather than assigning semantics to specific areas.