OpenStreetMap

These are part of the University of Cambridge, not the hospital. By removing these tags, you wreck the University of Cambridge's online map, so we propose to put them back in. If you don't like this, perhaps we can have a discussion about it, but in the meantime, we need our map back!

That sounds like you are tagging for the renderer.

Not at all: tagging for the renderer is where you tag something to make it appear the way you want on some particular renderer. These really are parts of the University, and the rest (almost all) the hospital isn't; grouping them together is just wrong, it makes them indistinguishable. In any case changing the tagging on a whim under our feet isn't helpful.

The tag `operator=University of Cambridge` is the correct way to indicate that a node is part of another institution. `amenity=university` is a much more major thing to signify that there is (the centre of) a significant university here. E.g. The tags on node 1642015081 are saying 'There is a University called "Department of Radiology" here'. Ref: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity=university

By 'online map' are you referring to the blue squares here?
http://map.cam.ac.uk/#52.175363,0.141020,17
The correct fix is to key them off `operator=University of Cambridge` instead of `amenity=university`
I appreciate that my changeset messed the map up for you so won't revert the incorrect amenity=university tags but please do so after updating that mapping stylesheet.

Not just those. This area is not a university campus, but some parts of it are University. Not is it a hospital completely. And some of it is private commercial. There is already a boundary for the campus, but it's a diverse place.

Operator is completely insufficient to represent the data here or elsewhere in Cambridge. University of Cambridge "operates" many things that aren't "university". building=university might be sufficient, though some of these locations aren't actually separate buildings. I think amenity=university expresses the intent here. There are tens of thousands of such instances across Cambridge that have been used in this way for five years or more. It would be a mammoth job to change these, simply because you disagree with the way the tag has been used.

There are 1,249 nodes or ways within 20km of Cambridge that are tagged with amenity=university. 1,237 of these (i.e. almost all) have an operator=* tag on them.
Across the UK there are only 2,391 nodes or ways tagged with amenity=university.
It's great that Cambridge is so well mapped, but I think it's safe to say that amenity=university is grossly overused around Cambridge and that can and should be fixed.
This is supported by
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Duniversity
"Individual elements of the university should not be tagged with amenity=university but can be mapped with operator=* and the name of the university"

Query to come up with those figures:
https://gist.github.com/eoghanmurray/4f0aa7debed9ade8a85d50cbe06b972d

In my original changeset I incorrectly said "We should have one enclosing way to represent this hospital university campus."
This is because the presence of operator=university misled me into believing that this was a "University Hospital". (If ways were used instead of nodes I might not have made this mistake, as a node can be used to roughly indicate the centre of something, i.e. it doesn't necessarily delineate a separate area)

Link to previous discussion for completeness: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2015-May/017455.html .

I suggest bulk changing all `amenity=university` within 20km of Cambridge to `map.cam.ac.uk=university` or similar so that there is minimal update/disruption required to that 3rd party software. @davidearl is that acceptable? I can execute that part of it if you like.
We can then go about using `amenity=university` tag for the very few major named colleges and campuses in this area, on nodes, ways or relations as appropriate.
This isn't on a whim; as an OSM user and data consumer not living in the UK but trying to understand universities there, it's frustrating and misleading to have minor things tagged with amenity=university.

Now, that *would be* tagging for the renderer! I really don't think that is the answer. (Nor is "operator" on its own, that's not enough information).

Cambridge University is not a campus University. There are about 10 areas you might call campuses in the conventional sense, maybe, and also 30 or so University colleges, which are independent institutions which are also part of the University but not operated by it. There are numerous smaller "campuses", in the limit being individual properties, or areas within other properties (of which these hospital ones are just a selection). For example, this: http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/48910156 is different only in scale, not status. If I try to take your logic to the limit, there would be no amenity=university in for University of Cambridge, because there is no single amenity. I chose to take it to the other limitwhen this was all first mapped in 2011.

I don't think by making a change here you're going to get the answer to your "use case" you want anyway, because Cambridge University (and indeed others, it's not unique) just doesn't fit your model of an institution in one or a few large campuses. It is way more complicated than that. It seems like you want to re-engineer the data so it provides the answer you want to get, but I'm not sure the question makes sense in the context of this institution. Are you counting Campuses? If so, by what judgement is Douglas House less a Campus than, say, Homerton College, or the "Silver Street/Mill Lane site"? And what about co-operative ventures? Or if you are counting University's you won't get the answer 1 for us, short of completely re-organising it all as a single relation, because of the multiple campuses and collegiate system. You'd either get zero or a dozen or so, or 50, or 1500 or so depending what you look at. You also can't say that a building isn't a university because some universities (not Cambridge, obviously) *are* single buildings.

A relation which contains all the University premises might be an answer, but it would probably also need some new tags, which identify campuses or property areas, as opposed to buildings, and similar. It's really hard to maintain relations though, and it really doesn't add anything to the information, it's just a different way of grouping. building=university has been suggested, but it doesn't solve the problem of things which aren't buildings like the hospital ones, and it means the building can't be tagged as anything else (e.g. a residential block which is university premises). amenity=university_premises or some such might work, but then requires everything else that understands universities to change.

But theses all require someone to make an investment of significant amounts of staff time and real money to cope with non-upward-compatible change.

I did think about the way the University is tagged long and hard before I did it, and published the method. The interpretation of amenity=university in the way you want to make it largely post-dates that.

(Whatever else, just locally changing some blobs in the hospital area inconsistently with the rest is surely the worst possible answer.)

It's clear that your usage of `amenity=university` is different from the rest of the UK, and I respect that you thought about the tagging scheme thoroughly in 2011. I'm proposing `map.cam.ac.uk=university` to show that the tag has a specific usage (in terms of meaning, not just rendering) outside of OSM, and additionally to provide a new means of discovery of a useful external map, similarly to how we link to wikipedia articles.
Note: I didn't originally accuse you of tagging for the renderer.

This just seems like a hack, and it'll all end up going round the same circle again in future.

But also, it effectively means University of Cambridge as an entity effectively disappears off the map completely (except for the University's own map) because it would be represented as a non-standard tag, including in the application you seem to be envisaging. Operator simply doesn't encapsulate "university-ness".

It was "trigpoint" who said tagging for the renderer.

A good rule of thumb about 'what is a university' i.e. what should be tagged with `amenity=university` would be to look at the list of campuses/sites/colleges at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge
So less than 1,000, but more than 1.
So for Douglas House, it should be tagged if it is indeed it's own site/college on a par with one of the 31 major colleges. But at the moment, if this is true, it's lost amongst all the other 1,000+ `amenity=university` tags on minor buildings or sections of hospitals etc.
The 'amenity=university;name=University of Cambridge' tag if required will almost certainly be on a relation (at the moment there is no entity tagged like that that I can see).
From living outside the UK, I've heard of the 'University of Cambridge', but not (until recently) of the fact that individual colleges are basically as important institutions as other major Universities elsewhere. What I'm proposing is that the tagging system reserves amenity=university for the 31 colleges, and major campuses, so that I can learn this info from the map. This is pretty much how Oxford is tagged I believe.
At any rate, that doesn't have to be all decided at once with a change to `map.cam.ac.uk=university` but can continue to evolve as other people contribute to OSM.

> Whatever else, just locally changing some blobs in the hospital area inconsistently with the rest is surely the worst possible answer.

Yes! This is the problem! I was only examining a local area without knowledge of how the wider Cambridge area is currently tagged, and I made changes consistent with how universities are tagged in the rest of the UK. Future mappers will surely do the same, so lets change it to be consistent with the rest of the UK and move on!

EoghanM: I dont think the usage in Cambridge is drastically different from usage elsewhere. For Nottingham University there are 3 major amenity=university campuses, but also a number of discrete buildings or part of buildings (notably the Medical School & Postgraduate Medical Centre located within NHS Hospital campuses). One of these campuses, Kings Meadow, is purely an administrative site. Nottingham has additional campuses: one 10 miles away (Sutton Bonington), the other two about 6000 miles away, and the latter two are branded University of Nottingham but are actually joint venture enterprises. So a single relation isn't going to work here even to just cover the 6 campuses. The buildings not in or conveniently close enough to be mapped as exclaves of a campus are treated in ways analogous to the Cambridge situation, but buildings within campuses are not so treated; but then Cambridge doesn't really have true campuses.

I would suggest changing the tagging to break a widely used application which can be cited as an example of OSM's real-world utility is not a good idea. Particularly as the University of Cambridge spend good money in developing that app, this would primarily send a message that we care not a fig for people who use the data.

I'm not suggesting a relation to join geographically remote campuses; the `operator=University of Nottingham` tag already does this effectively.