Add universities?

[kjonosm]

How about adding universities to the index? According to OSM-Wiki they should be listed in the operator tree.

[kymckay]

I'm not sure that there would be enough applicable elements for any give university to warrant including them.

[UKChris-osm]

This has come up before, and I think the idea hasn't been pushed forward because (as @kymckay mentioned above) so few Universities operate multiple campuses that it wouldn't be worth having in the index.

While many Campus locations would have multiple elements within it (buildings, parking, etc) all these would likely be enclosed in a boundary marking the university campus as a whole.

[kjonosm]

I did some quick overpass turbo queries browsing through Europe and there are quite a few universities that do not reside on one or multiple campuses but are scattered across the city:

• Cologne University
• Berlin Free University
• Berlin Technical University
• Humboldt University Berlin
• Université de Paris
• Université Sorbonne
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
• Universitat de Barcelona
• Università degli Studi di Roma
• Warsaw University
• Vienna University
• Zurich University
• Coimbra University

According to OSM wiki, most individual features (institutes, departments etc.) should not be tagged with amenity=university. However, I think NSI should be able to support that requirement.

[bhousel]

That's an interesting idea - my initial thought was to say "no" but I clicked on a few of the overpass links, and these are actually campuses that have dozens or hundreds of building=university combined with operator=whatever.

I agree that I could see it being useful for building=university and amenity=parking, and maybe more, but not for the amenity=university feature.