I muse whether "Federally Funded Research and Development Centers" (FFRDCs) are amenable to either "landuse=military" or something like it. I'm not proposing a vote because this may be peculiarly USA-centric. (Then again, maybe it isn't, as there may very well be similar entities in other countries).

Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_Funded_Research_and_Development_Center we see that for each of these, there is an Administrator (such as RAND Corporation, MITRE, Associated Universities, Inc. or University of California) consisting of private corporations, and both private and public universities, as well a Sponsor, which is a much shorter list consisting largely of Department of Energy, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NASA (supposed to be civilian), and National Science Foundation (and that's about it, unless you get more specific within DoD, like "Department of the Army").

Indeed, this wikipedia article quotes a source of "Congressional Research Service: 'The Quasi Government: Hybrid Organizations with Both Government and Private Sector Legal Characteristics.'" And so, these hybrid or quasi-government/military/private sector/(sometimes) public university entities do more often than not fit the definition of "landuse=military" which is "for tagging land areas owned/used by the military for whatever purpose."

Notwithstanding the Military page in the wiki which states "exercise caution and know your rights related to mapping military facilities," I do wonder whether we may want to extend some of the "military=*" tags (airfield, barracks, bunker, range...) to include these areas. Maybe "military=research_facility" with this rendering into a concomitant red-hatched area in mapnik/standard?

This was initiated by noticing that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=37.6881587505341&lon=-121.704912185669&zoom=15) is a "hole" with respect to landuse around the rest of the City of Livermore, California. This particular facility is administered by the University of California (but clearly is not landuse=university) and sponsored by the Department of Energy, which as a national, cabinet-level department, is largely concerned with nuclear weapons and reactors, radioactive waste and domestic energy. Nuclear fusion (and perhaps weapons) research are being researched at this particular facility, so at least "landuse=industrial" is correct. But is some flavor of "military" more precise, or not?

SteveA
California

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