Funnily enough this long-standing issue came up at our pub meeting last month. Although my reaction has always been to let sleeping dogs lie, this was clearly not the consensus.
I've sent a message to University of Cambridge Information Services who run the map.cam.ac.uk site which consumes the OSM data, to warn them that a change is impending. It's probably worth holding off for a week or so to allow them to assess any impact on their map. Incidentally, knowing a specific contact point would help as university IT departments can be big beasts these days. It does show that having a good contact point is always a good idea for directed edits when data is in use. As others have said there is a lot of inconsistency: particular with former houses taken into University or College ownership which sometimes get building=house/semi and other times building=university. There are other college buildings of this type which are not hit by amenity=university at all. Other general points I noticed relating to inconsistency/issues (largely arising because Cambridge got mapped earlier than many places or it just has a lot of things which are otherwise rare): - Theological Colleges are loosely associated with the university, and are equally loosely amenity=university in their own right. I don't know if we have a regular way of tagging non-degree awarding religious training centres. These are something of an Oxbridge speciality. I see the London Institute of Theology is tagged <https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/524375396> as a college. Years ago I mapped Coleg Trefecca as a conference centre, but used old_ tags to indicate it's historical role as a college training people for the ministry. Fortunately some of the odder places <https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/53.18591/-3.02706> of former times have similarly changed their roles. - Sports facilities (especially isolated playing fields and boathouses) are just tagged with a ref and operator. Pavilions are often tagged building=university, as is the sports centre. - Cambridge colleges are independent corporations in their own right, so probably should have separate amenity=university relations (although the world is unlikely to end if not). They mostly form discrete campuses. Isolated parts are named separately so just replacing these with a relation doesn't work. North Court, Emma is one such example. There are similarly very well known parts of the university with their own widely used names: Downing Site, New Museums, West Cambridge etc. This is true of most universities now that many are multi-campus. I don't think we have a good approach to these: roles in relations, campus_name … are all possibilities. (This also applies to schools now that one academy can take over another). - There's plenty of (non-public accessible) student accommodation which is not mapped as such. I presume this is intentional. Examples the Trinity staircase above the bike shop on Jesus Lane, most of Lower Park St (Jesus), and Portugal Place, - Multiple buildings mapped as one <https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/147487988>. There are probably others, but this one I know. The larger part of the building is the former Cambridgeshire County Hall <https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/101265198-county-hall-cambridge#.Xjr8Fm52u01>, built around 1910 and Grade II listed, the S part is a 17th century house <https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/101332167-christs-college-x-staircase-cambridge-market-ward#.Xjr7yG52u00> (formerly 'X' staircase), also Grade II. The two buildings form a single unit of student accommodation which presumably reflects the mapping. Cheers, Jerry On Tue, 4 Feb 2020 at 15:15, Dave F via Talk-GB <talk-gb@openstreetmap.org> wrote: > On 04/02/2020 14:28, Dan S wrote: > > Hi Dave, > > > > I agree with what you suggest. Can we be a bit precise though about > > what you propose? You're proposing to remove amenity=university from > > building=university in Cambridge, and make no other tagging changes? > > That's correct. I'm going to load the 1050 return by this overpass query > into JOSM: > [bbox:{{bbox}}]; > nwr[amenity=university][building=university]; > out meta geom; > > plus another 7 which are still tagged as building=yes. > > > (Ironically, the current tagging makes it hard for me to search to see > > if there's a "proper" amenity=university in there somewhere, e.g. as a > > relation or area covering a large swathe of them.) > > There isn't, I'm afraid.. it's a right hotchpotch > > https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/QnH > > These are the remaining 117 amenity=university which will need to be > rectified at a later date.. > > Cheers > DaveF > > Op di 4 feb. 2020 om 14:15 schreef Dave F via Talk-GB > > <talk-gb@openstreetmap.org>: > >> Hi > >> There was a discussion 5 years ago. There may have been others. > >> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2015-May/017455.html > >> > >> Many amenity=university tags were added unnecessarily to building=yes > >> A contributor had converted these to building=university, in accordance > >> with the wiki. > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:building%3Duniversity > >> > >> https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/40649767 > >> This allows the removal of the amenity tags without loss of data. > >> > >> The user who created his disparate tagging schema has had plenty of time > >> to rectify. I think this should be performed now. > >> > >> _______________________________________________ > >> Talk-GB mailing list > >> Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org > >> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb > > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-GB mailing list > Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb >
_______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb