I recently saw that Delhi University isn’t mapped properly. So, I started working on it.
I started with making a multi polygon for South Campus. However, I came across a problem. South Campus is spread across a large area, with some of its constituent colleges in completely different parts of Delhi. How I am supposed to mark the HQ of South Campus in this multi polygon?
Also, should I add off campus colleges of DU as individuals to the University relation, or should I bundle them all under an “off campus” campus relation?
=university should be used for a geographically associated campus. When type=multipolygon or type=site is discussed, it’s usually considered for facilities close to each other.
Please be aware this page was created by a controversial blocked user undiscussed. You should not follow it blindly. Key:campus - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Instead, I suggest to reuse brand=Delhi University on those =university campuses. There are 100 nwr[amenity=university][brand]; used already.
Collegiate universities are the complicated cases. If the colleges are far away from each other, they can be different features. Grouping them arbitrarily is close to making them categories, which should be avoided. =university has no indication of an hq. You could create office= of the chancellor, “court”, council, senate, and administration, etc.
Sorry, I was not able to understand what you said clearly. Can you help me with an example? Say I have a remote college ABC that is regarded to be part of “South Campus.” Should I just add brand=Delhi University to it? How can I show that it is considered part of “South Campus” and not “North Campus.”
This is really a difficult case. Other collegiate universities probably don’t usually use an intermediate “Campus” term to group colleges far away. Is it more for administrative purposes, branding, or a “region”-like extent?
I am not sure actually. (@contrapunctus can you help?) I would say it is more of a branding and region thing. It is like saying that students from South Delhi should choose colleges in South Campus. It also conveys that colleges in South Campus are more “prestigious” than off campus colleges. If I have to choose one, I would say branding.
I would be inclined to create the University as a multipolygon. Then you can add names of the buildings within each multipolygon part: - “Smith Building (South Campus)”, etc.
Actually, the Northern Regional College is something I’ve been meaning to think of a better way of mapping ever since I did some (unrelated to OSM) work for them a while back.
One issue with a multipolygon is that the satellite sites have their own postcodes. The main site is one of the Ballymena ones, and the others have different addresses. Currently “addr:city” for the multipolygon is set to Coleraine.
The challenge is to find a way of mapping it - a site relation may work, but support of those is not great.
What I’ve tried to do (at NRC, and at other multi site institutions) is to accept that the address of the institution is (say) Coleraine, and have other addresses tagged on the site boundary or main building at the other sites.
It makes sense to me - if you want to write to NRC, you write to their main HQ at Union Street, Coleraine. If you want to turn up in Newtonabbey for a metalwork class, you need to know that address too, and it’s tagged on the boundary of that particular site.
I’ve never been there, but I actually got the impression that the “main” site was Trostan Avenue in Ballymena** .
The area for that is this way which is part of this multipolygon. The way that multipolygons are handled means that each geometrical component of that (here, multiple areas) is considered to have the multipolygon’s tags, so the Trostan Avenue site (and all the others) currently has an addr:city of Coleraine.
The buildings are tagged separately; this is the main one on Trostan Avenue. Currently that doesn’t have an address, but adding address info to buildings might help here.
This is all a bit of a diversion from the North / South situation in Delhi; although NRC does have three areas in Ballymena those didn’t seem to be branded together as one separate thing different to the other satellite campuses.
.