A lot of water and sewage treatment works in GB have the abbreviations “WTW”, “WwTW”, or “STW” in their names, as you can see on the new and improved OpenInfraMap water layer.
I’m planning to do a simple mechanical edit to correct the following:
WTW → Water Treatment Works
WwTW → Wastewater Treatment Works
STW → Sewage Treatment Works
These will be restricted to the appropriate man_made=water_works or man_made=wastewater_plant objects. In some cases these abbreviations are in brackets or have a slash (such as “Grosmont/STW”) and I will also strip these.
Unless there are any objections I’ll aim to do this edit next week.
Regardless of whether this change is a good idea or not, in Thames Water’s book of abreviations at least, an “SPS” is a “Sewage Pumping Station”. Example:
Actually a higher priority reason to not rename these right now is that I suspect that a number have been misnamed due to an off-by-one error. Grosmont appears to be an example (surely that should be called “Gunnerside” - just down the alphabet a little).
This not the first time that that particular name adder hasn’t had brain engaged when adding these names. I’ve commented on the Grosmont changeset, but suspect that if any others have been added recently by the same person from the same source they will be wrong too.
The last lot of errors were all fixed by people on talk-gb back in Feb 2023 or so.
Every Water and Sewage Company (WaSC) in England and Wales does not use the same abbreviations. Wessex Water refer to Water Recycling Centres, not Wastewater Treatment Works.
Also not all wastewater treatment works are sewage treatment works. Other organisations may be operating their own wastewater treatment prior to discharge into the environment or the public sewer network.
Since this thread got bumped and I forgot about it: I didn’t manage to find an appropriately-licensed dataset to validate these with.
The Environmental Permitting Regulations dataset is nice, but it’s licensed under the Environment Agency Conditional Licence which is very much not open data. (This is because it contains personal data, which we don’t actually care about. I have made it clear to DEFRA and the recent landuse consultation that it would be nice to see the non-identifiable parts of these datasets licensed under OGL.) It also identifies the outflows which are often not particularly close to the sewage treatment works themselves.
The Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive data looks more suitable, but strangely for a central government dataset it’s licensed under CC-BY, which is also incompatible as-is. I emailed them today about licensing.
It’s very much not appropriate for OSM, but it’s worth a glance by anyone who wants to look at the breadth of types of facilities that exist. It’s more than just (“a pumping station here, a sewage works there”).
