The Hub, Edinburgh building tagging
did:plc:4tuge3k3comfj4nfvqnwkemn
March 31, 2026
The Hub, Edinburgh rendered with Beakerboy’s OSM Building Viewer https://beakerboy.github.io/OSMBuilding/index.html?id=42997989
I’m working on a project using OSM building data so I thought I’d familiarise myself with the building:part and roof tags and see what the editing process is like.
The Hub only had height data and a basic outline tagged for the spire, so as the highest man made point in Edinburgh, it made for a good candidate to get stuck in.
I used height data from the OGL licensed Scottish LiDAR Phase 5 DSM that covers Edinburgh, and photos of the building from Wikimedia Commons
The elevation profile tool in QGIS proved useful for exploring the LiDAR data (after I worked out how to right-click to confirm the path). I normalised the elevation to zero with the raster calculator and set a custom colour ramp to aid visualisation:
Definitely fiddly to get right but interesting to see the level of 3D detail achievable with just a handful of tags and open data. There are more details to sort out, but I think I made a decent start.
Visualised changeset: https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-change-viz?c=180674112#20/55.94878/-3.19521
Here’s what it looked like in Streets GL and F4Map before my edits (these take a while to update)
https://streets-gl.pages.dev/#55.94901,-3.19519,45.00,302.70,342.25
https://demo.f4map.com/#lat=55.9489462&lon=-3.1951278&zoom=19&camera.phi=56.15
(I tagged the main pitched roof seen here yesterday)
Discussion in the ATmosphere