OpenStreetMap
I've been confined at home by work and the weather, so haven't been able to map bridleways for a few days.
Instead, I spent some time today filling in features that are mostly visible at higher zooms - some drainage ditches near footways, the bridges in St John's College, some larger buildings on West and Grange Roads and within Churchill College. This is all from personal knowledge but after 8 years here my knowledge is pretty good!
A question: some Cambridge buildings have been drawn out as an area and tagged but also contain a lone node in their centre with the same tags. This causes Osmarender to render the details twice, although Mapnik seems to handle it better... Is this necessary anymore, or should the node tags for buildings be removed in the cases where an area for that building bears the same tags?
Since many universities (in the UK, at least) have a collegiate system, I also wondered if it would be worth having specific tags to identify individual college's lands as well as general university property.
Discussion
Comment from davidearl on 11 August 2008 at 10:24
It wasn't always so. Names (and icons) on areas are quite new. Mapnik only handles it "better" in the sense that it has collision detection for labels, and for many areas the node and "centre" of the area overlap. If the area is a strange shape or the node is offset, Mapnik will put the similar labels in too.
So I think the University nodes can largely be removed as they are redundant. They always were tagging for rendering. Where the corresponding area is missing the name tags, they need to be added.
A related issue is school tags. Throughout Cambridgeshire I've marked amenity=school for the area of the school grounds. But the buildings are usually near the road side, so I've put a node with the name to stand for that. If we put the name on the area too it gets rendered twice. The answer is, of course, to do the buildings as buildings, like the colleges have been. The problem is that this only really works in Yahoo covered areas, and this only extends a few km outside the city (elsehwere it often possible to get frontages, but the depth and shape of the buildings away from the road is hard). Even so, though, we get a label for the building and a label for the area. Sometimes this is a good thing - individual buildings sometimes have individual names within an overall college. But that's not so often the case with schools.
Re the college/university distimnction, you'll have seen that I originally put names e.g. "Pembroke College (University of Cambridge)" or "... (U of Cambridge)". If we put something like affiliation="University of Cambridge", or created a relation grouping the institutions, I guess that would work, but I'm not sure it would lead to a terribly helpful rendering (yes, I know we shouldn't tag for the renderer specifically). If you were doing a map specifically of University premises, it would be very useful (except you'd probably want to distinguish between colleges and departments), but in a general map, knowing that this group of university buildings is U of C and the others are ARU is surely helpful. So I don't know. Maybe both.
The detail in Cambridge City Centre is getting phenomenal, which is great. I do worry that when one goes more than a couple of km away from Reality Checkpoint, Cambridge and South Cambs villages aren't getting much attention over the original "named streets and POIs" that I originally did - thout Tom Judd is doing great work filling in the droves and dykes north east of the city, and several people have been working hard on footpath and bridleways in the area. I suppose it is inevitable that the ease of the aerial photography, the "sexiness" of the city centre over suburbs and it's where more people live or know means this will be the case.
David
Comment from Andrew Chadwick on 11 August 2008 at 13:17
A workable scheme seems to have emerged for Oxford's colleges, departments, and PPHs. I prefer it to the Durham system as documented because that conflates 6th-form colleges with university colleges, and doesn't use name when it should. Obviously (inevitably?) the way that's been used in Oxford is a little Oxford-specific, but it could possibly be adapted and reworked into a more generic pattern for representing collegiate universities if there's some general agreement.