[Tagging] multiple schools on one plot

stevea steveaOSM at softworkers.com
Fri Apr 2 19:21:48 UTC 2021


On Apr 2, 2021, at 8:01 AM, Robin Burek <robin.burek at gmx.de> wrote:
> Am 02.04.2021 um 11:04 schrieb stevea:
> 
>> Marc_marc makes a valid point.  However, it does seem to be already established that tagging amenity=school on a (multi)polygon that describes "the fence" (should one exist, essentially defining "in or out") or "the boundary" (of the school) suffices.
> amenity=school is not the boundary or the fence - IT  IS the school. When you habe one ground with one ground with only one school - this is clear. - When you have one ground (exacerbating maybe just with one building) and more than one school - and you map the boundary of this ground as amenity=school too - you create a "fake school" in the database, because see sentence one.

AND / OR, it is the "area" (as defined by our amenity=school wiki, where the "Used on these elements" section CLEARLY allows this tag to be applied to an area / closed polygon or multipolygon).  Perhaps this is a misunderstanding on your part, but this has simply always been true in OSM, so people have always tagged "school grounds" (the area defined by the enclosing fence or boundary/border of the school) like this:  with an area way (closed polygon / multipolygon).

>> Same for my example of my local amenity=university (University of California, we have eleven of these as different campuses sprinkled about the state):  it has ten nodes tagged amenity=college, the ten named (residential) colleges at that university campus.  This makes perfect sense both to locals who know this university and its colleges, as well as we who tag in OSM and find amenity=university on the enclosing polygon and amenity=college on ten nodes inside of it (to locate the residential colleges) to be perfectly workable.
> This sounds like the UCSC - and there - from the wiki - is sound for me like a mistake - amenity=collage is not for university, also not for organizational units of a university. See the discription in the wiki: "A place for further education, a post-secondary education institution which is not a University". - I hope you can help me here.

OK, here is the help you might need:  the "university" is the entire campus, the whole institution, made up of a graduate school division, ten residential colleges, academic divisions (like natural sciences, humanities, arts...) as well as the requisite buildings and infrastructure necessary to provide these.  The amenity=university tag belongs on the enclosing polygon (so it is) and the amenity=college tags belong on the ten nodes to represent the ten residential colleges as they cluster together offices and classrooms specific TO that college ON the university campus, along with dormitories / apartments for the students who live at that residential college (again, ON the university campus), and again, so they are.

> In the german wiki to amenity=college the is to this an extra section for this purpose - I would it translate like:
> "Differentiation from English usage 
> In English usage, sub-units (german: "Fakultät") of universities are also referred to as "colleges". This designation is misleading here, as such facilities should always be tagged as amenity = university."

You'll never be able to "shoehorn" (attempt to "stuff into a simplistic definition a complex concept") the idea of colleges and universities into such an overtly simple "one or the other" kind of ontology:  the richness and variability of colleges, universities and the ways that they are both separate from each other and interact with one another — even on one campus — is impossible to make such a simplistic definition fit very well, especially worldwide.  All OSM needs is the single "existence proof" I've given of UCSC, and its (correct today, correct a decade-plus-ago when it was established — and it has never once been changed) and "there we have it."

> So this is a littlebit confusing to me.... And the german explanation make sense to me.... :D 

You are allowed to be confused.  However, when presented with the actual truth of how we tag, how we document we tag and how we have tagged, I hope you can become unconfused.

>> "Messing around" with landuse at this point in time has serious potential to "make a mess."  I don't know why we'd actively choose to do that.  If we must "mess around" with landuse, we should do so very, very carefully.
>> 
>> Let's keep our syntax as neat and clean as we can, please!  It's like good hygiene!
>> 
> For me it is unclean to determine the shared schoolground and the two (three, four, ...) schools on it both as an school (amenity=school).... 

It is possible you do not recognize that amenity=school is perfectly OK as a tag on BOTH nodes AND areas.  So, we do.

SteveA




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