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What is the difference between office=educational_institution and amenity=school or university?

The wiki page for office=educational_institution states that it should be used on an "organization offering formal education; for example, a school, college or university." This definition seems to me to be at odds with existing tags used for such places, namely amenity=school, amenity=university, and amenity=college. As I wrote on the Talk page, the transaltion used by iD for the tag rather unfortunately coincides with the name given to public schools in some Spanish-speaking countries (i.e. Institución Educativa + some name), resulting in schools there not being tagged with amenity=school at all and only with office=educational_institution.

So, how does office=educational_institution differ from the existing amenity=* alternatives for such places?

tag

asked 12 Jul '16, 10:35

carciofo
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accept rate: 0%

edited 12 Jul '16, 10:36

One Answer:

A friend of mine works for a local university. One of his job is to ensure that rooms for lectures etc. are distributed sensibly among competing requirements (a popular course gets a bigger room, because more people turn up and a less popular course a smaller one, even though the same number of students might be enrolled).

I suspect that the intention of this tag was that, if mapped separately, the building he works in would be an "office=educational_institution" and the building with the rooms he books would be part of an "office=university".

However, looking at usage locally, it actually seems to be used as a bit of a catch-all for where other tags might not fit. For personal rendering purposes I just dumped it in a "nonspecific offices" category.

Also be aware of potential issus tagging non-campus and multi-site institutions. There's a local discussion of that here and here. While Cambridge is a bit of an exception where university tagging is concerned, multi-site institutions abound and so you won't get a one-to-one mapping of amenity=university to "real world university".

answered 12 Jul '16, 11:16

SomeoneElse ♦
36.9k●71●370●866
accept rate: 16%

Right, thanks for the info. So this seems to be a rather specific tag, but iD ignores the office part entirely and focuses on the institution side of it. I'm not convinced that educational_institution is a good name for an office, but I'm more concerned about getting iD to stop suggesting & applying this tag instead of amenity=school when someone searches for "educational institution". Even the icon displayed (a building) is more representative of an "institution" than an "office", so there's no way for the user to know (s)he's doing so. Any ideas on how to get that accomplished would be appreciated.

(12 Jul '16, 11:53) carciofo

For iD translation, see the answer to this question:

https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/23930/is-it-possible-to-use-id-in-another-language

iD also uses keywords (such as shop brand names) to suggest tags. The github repository is https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD - probably more info there.

(12 Jul '16, 12:37) SomeoneElse ♦