Brussels

For the Region of Brussels Capital, see Brussels Capital Region.

The City of Brussels (Bruxelles-Ville - Stad Brussel) is a city in Brussels Capital Region, Belgium at latitude 50°51′17.64″ North, longitude 4°22′31.80″ East.

Languages

Brussels (Bruxelles in French or Brussel in Dutch) is officially a bilingual region. Name of streets, places, government offices must be written in both languages (conventionally "fr - nl" for computer-processability purposes), with a proper separator (" - ", i.e. space hyphen space) and by adding one-language names in name:fr=* and name:nl=*. (Discussions from 2008 about tagging standards can be found here: Belgium project discussion page.)

As a consequence, any name having the " - " separator should be assumed to be a multilingual name. If this is not the case, e.g. a college named "RITCS – Campus Dansaert" you can use the "en dash" sign (U+2013) instead of the hyphen: the name will show up normally on the map and Nominatim searches will find it correctly when people type a hyphen.

Naming streets properly can be tricky near administrative borders. Each municipality will choose how the street is officially named and ground truth (street signs) always prevails. The following issues are to be considered:

• Some long streets which span over several municipalities have a different spelling (Ridderschapslaan in the City of Brussels becomes Ridderschaplaan in Etterbeek and the border is in the middle of the road; Notelaarsstraat in the City of Brussels is written Notelaarstraat in Schaerbeek) or a different way to write the same thing (Waversesteenweg becomes Steenweg op Waver; Waterloosteenweg becomes Steenweg op Waterloo and at the next border becomes Waterloosesteenweg). Most of those variations are for the Dutch name, while the French name stays the same for each municipality.
• Some streets are on the border between Brussels (bilingual) and Flanders (only Dutch).

Extreme care is required when dealing with map data in those rare situations. Usually, the name will concatenate both full names with the " / " separator this time, and we make use of name:left=*, name:right=*, name:left:fr=*, name:left:nl=*, name:right:fr=* and name:right:nl=*. If one of the values is identical on both sides of the street (typically name:fr=* within Brussels and name:nl=* on the border between Brussels and Flanders), do not concatenate the same value twice. Contrary to highways, addresses always belong to a single municipality, and they will have a simplified address. associatedStreet relations are grouped per municipality, with a single postcode and a single spelling of the street name. Needless to say, most Q/A tools are unaware of those Belgian curiosities and will flag potential tagging errors: Osmose will raise a false positive warning about similar names.

Transport

People mapping in Brussels

List yourself here if you've been doing any mapping Brussels

• Jloriaux - worked on the Brussels map
• Grungie - lives in Brussels
• PhilippeP - works in Brussels
• Moyogo - from aerial imagery and walking around too much
• pluimpje - lives in Brussels (from aerial imagery and my own gps tracks)
• Koying - lives and works in Brussels
• Polyglot - I work on public transport mostly, mapped several tram lines, using UrbIS data as a basis and integrating with the rest of the data.
• Velosteph - involved in cycling defense in Brussels, I build routes for cycling thru Brussels. I have also several GPS tracks in stock, and on my own webiste a database with all the street names AND the description of the official regional network of bycicle routes, so one of my project is to find a way to translate these datas into maps...
• eMerzh - lives and works in Brussels ;-)
• BenoitL — lives and works in Brussels
• Paul-Andre Duchesne - lives and works in Brussels - Map either from Bing aerial images, tracks from my smartphone or my data logger, collect infos while walking and cycling in Brussel :)
• Foxandpotatoes - lives in Brussels and has made UrbIS imports in the south of the region.
• Npettiaux — lives and works in Brussels
• bxl-forever - lives and works in Brussels - hyperactive contributor

Also add your user page into Category:Users in Belgium