[Talk-GB] too many universities in Cambridge

[SK53]

I've just been looking at operator tags on amenity=university.

The first point is that 600+ are not tagged with operator.

Secondly, *university hospitals*, such as Addenbrookes cause problems. In
practice most buildings in university hospitals are NHS owned & operated (I
got round this at QMC Nottingham because the medical school is in a
discrete part of the building) with only some parts being university proper
(mainly some teaching & research facilities). I doubt for instance if the East
Anglian Blood Transfusion Centr <http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/52161480>e
is a university particularly as the operator is given as "National Blood
Service". Addenbrookes only does clinical teaching so is different from
QMC. However there are plenty of 'University Hospitals' which are pure NHS
establishments but which do some teaching. IMO Addenbrookes should be
tagged operator="Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust". As
an addendum the Addenbrookes campus raises another issue: there are at
least 3 hospitals on site (Addenbrookes itself, the Rosie & the new
Papworth). The campus as a whole and the individual hospitals can all be
tagged as amenity=hospital, which I would regard as valid tagging, because
the campus and its constituent elements are different things so not
violating one tag one element. This is a broader problem related to one
element is part of a bigger whole. Either way I would avoid the multiple
hospital icons as Addenbrookes is currently shown.

A third problem are *associated research institutes*. For instance on the
Nottingham main campus is the MRC Institute of Hearing Research. This is in
a dedicated building built in the early 1980s, presumably with MRC funds,
but on UoN land. Similarly I'm not sure of the status of the LMB on the
Addenbrookes site: in the past this was wholly owned & operated by the MRC
(I could ask, I knew the current director when I was an undergrad, and met
him again last year): certainly most staff had fairly limited university
connections, although more senior ones often got college fellowships, and
junior ones did a bit of teaching. (As an aside, Wolfson House, where the
OSM servers are located used to more complicated: UCL ran out of money
building it so get the MRC to chip in and the MRC in turn had a lease on
the top two floors, as well as another unit on the 1st floor. The latter
unit was embedded in the university Genetics department, the other units
were not). (There is a little used tags amenity=research_institution or
research_institution=yes for these; as someone who spent a significant part
of my career in such places I dislike them being neglected).

Obviously federated institutions cause particular problems with a single
operator tag. These obviously include such places as Oxford, Cambridge,
London (and perhaps less relevant now University of Wales, and in the more
distant past Durham (Newcastle) and St Andrews (Dundee), but also National
University of Ireland. David's use of "Institution (Federation)" is about
the best one can do for now, but it may well be worth thinking about how to
address this with a more formal tag. I'm sure many other non-university
examples will come to mind.

So what can we do:


   1. Add operator tags to existing amenity=university elements
   2. Develop some consensus ideas about mapping of university hospitals &
   multi-hospital campuses
   3. Think about some tags to manage federated bodies (perhaps just
   federated_operator would do.

Cheers,

Jerry



On 22 May 2015 at 14:49, Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 22 May 2015 at 14:27, David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:
> > Andy, the operator tags are all the same, not the building names.
>
> No, they really aren't.
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/148247775 - "Churchill College
> (University of Cambridge)"
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/12861651 - "University of Cambridge"
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/98523431 - "Clare College (University
> of Cambridge)"
>
> > But also the assertion "within a few dozen miles" is wrong, as for
> > Nottingham in China.
>
> Read what I said, please:
>
> >> If there were two objects tagged as universities with
> >> identical names within a few dozen miles, I could make a guess they
> >> are the same university and write some rendering rules to suit.
>
> I make no assertion that all parts of the same university are within a
> dozen miles.
>
> I hope you realise that your tagging (using tags that imply 1200
> different universities) is causing problems, and think "what could I
> do to help other people" rather than "I don't want to change
> anything".
>
> Thanks,
> Andy
>
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