Talk:Key:floor:material

Suggest renaming

Hi, I suggest we rename this to ceiling:material, because I would like to reserve floor:material to model e.g. the floor type of shelter_type=lean_to with this key.--PangoSE (talk) 13:24, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Or bottom:material=* Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 15:36, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

Either of those would certainly seem more intuitive. At the moment this meaning of "floor" makes sense only in some 3D geometric interpretation, and for the rest of us it's saying the opposite of what it means. I've tried to explain this better on the page just now but... This "floor means ceiling" thing just seems like madness. -- Harry Wood (talk) 12:30, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Looking more generally at worldwide usage, it looks like the text on this page does not match it. 61k uses of floor:material are in Asia: https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/asia/keys/floor:material , 9k in Nepal https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/asia/nepal/keys/floor:material and 8k the Philippines https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/asia/philippines/keys/floor:material . There may be lots of 3d buildings mapped somewhere, but I doubt it - for the sample of data that I've looked at "floor" really does mean floor! Presumably the author of this path in 2013 choose something that meant something to them, but that was unfortunately a concept in English that already meant something generally, and the vast majority of usage is for that general concept. SomeoneElse (talk) 19:58, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

I think this was a misunderstanding from the beginning. The original revision of this article cited this discussion from 2013 as the basis for the proposal. At the time, there were already concerns about this key's name being counterintuitive. Dinamik's justification was that floor:material=* was already in use, but in fact it had only been introduced the previous month in an import of OpenDRI building data in the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal. [1][2] Virtually all the features were tagged concrete (4k), wood (191), jack_arch (13), or bamboo (13). Looking through the history of these features, floor:material=concrete was originally briefly tagged as building:floor_material=RCC/RBC (reinforced cement concrete/reinforced brick concrete). I think this three-story building tagged floor:material=wood in 1st floor; concrete above is indicative of the key's intent: floor:material=* always referred to the material of the top surface of a floor, not a ceiling. The almost 800 buildings tagged floor:material=concrete roof:material=metal, most of them tagged building:structure=load_bearing_brick_wall_in_cement_mortar, suggests the same. That said, jack_arch also appears on some two-story buildings as a floor material, whereas I think a jack arch is a type of wall or door construction.

This way is the only clear example that I've found of the key referring to a ceiling rather than a floor, but that was tagged in 2019, probably influenced by this article.

I think we should relegate the current documented definition to a footnote in favor of the common-sense definition.

 – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 21:01, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Tag is used to describe actual floor material in UK

This tag's more or less only use in the UK is for the purpose of describing floor coverings on floors inside pubs. The use case is to see if the pub is likely to accept a visitor with dirty boots. In most cases the associated tags clearly disambiguate likely meaning, until someone maps the upstairs room in the Lamb & Flag, Covent Garden 565171598 565171598. SK53 (talk) 19:37, 10 October 2021 (UTC) SK53 (talk) 19:37, 10 October 2021 (UTC)