amenity=research_institute

[danstowell]

The amenity=research_institute tag is fairly new (122 uses at time of writing EDIT: More than 2000 uses worldwide now), but seems uncontroversial and has been used all over the world (overpass link).

Today I "fixed" a research institute that had been tagged as amenity=university (changeset). Of course this kinda removed its status in the osm-carto rendering.

Research institutes are fairly similar to universities, so may I suggest that they could be rendered in the same way? This would be useful to incentivise mappers to tag them less ambiguously. I know the tag is not yet massive, but I'd like to see what you think. Cheers.

[pnorman]

122 uses is insufficient to be an established tag.

[matkoniecz]

Especially as it is a new tag - tagging scheme may improve.

[geozeisig]

Please render amenity=research institute in the same way as university. The wiki page has been redesigned, so it's clearer now how the tag should be applied. There are only 350 applications, but if research_institute has no color, landuse=commercial is often added. That does not belong together.

[kocio-pl]

How is it different from much more popular https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:office%3Dresearch (which would be rendered soon by #3061)?

[geozeisig]

office=research is a building or a part of a building (node). amenity=research_institute is a campus (area with several institute buildings). It would be good if both are considered. Example

[kocio-pl]

Interesting case - I'm not sure about the meaning for buildings/campuses, but at least this is consistently documented. Still the usage is too low (far less than ~2k) and while we have no latest data, growing the numbers is a slow process (~100/year):

[dieterdreist]

sent from a phone

On 1. Apr 2018, at 10:30, kocio-pl ***@***.***> wrote: How is it different from much more popular https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:office%3Dresearch (which would be rendered soon by #3061)

+1, office is for a office, amenity is for the institution (the space it occupies/where it is located). You could also have 2 institutions in the same building, or they could have different offices in the same facility.

[dieterdreist]

sent from a phone

On 1. Apr 2018, at 10:54, kocio-pl ***@***.***> wrote: Interesting case - I'm not sure about the meaning for buildings/campuses, but at least this is consistently documented. Still the usage is too low (far less than ~2k)

300 research institutions are not few, especially as they are often significant features. Do you know how many research institutions there are in the world?

[kocio-pl]

I don't know, but it's ~130 in Poland:

https://forumakademickie.pl/informator-fa/instytuty-badawcze/

[geozeisig]

In Germany, there are 25,000. Not all will be relevant. See Research Explorer.
I will work to get it more.

[kocio-pl]

Great!

I guess some of them can be just too small to be tagged as amenity=research_institute and instead may be tagged as office=research, due to our scheme definitions, but still 2k limit doesn't sound unreasonable.

But thanks for a question, @dieterdreist. There can be some important objects with lower numbers in reality and we should treat such cases in a special way.

[dieterdreist]

sent from a phone

On 2. Apr 2018, at 02:29, kocio-pl ***@***.***> wrote: I don't know, but it's ~130 in Poland:

currently there 349 in OSM, this is +25% since the “end” of taginfo history = a few months

[kocio-pl]

Nice, that's encouraging. I still hope for regular data updates, but even manual quarterly updates would be good: tyrasd/taghistory#10 (comment).

The question is how would we like to render such objects?

[geozeisig]

The color like university would be good. Something else is good too, maybe a bit darker?

[Tomasz-W]

Yellow amenity=university fill + label would be ok.
Another option is to discuss about some blue fill + dark-blue label for office areas and research institutes.

[geozeisig]

Fixes #2077
Add rendering for office=research.
The color like amenity=university fill + label would be good.

[geozeisig]

Can we open a PR? I don't know what to do.

[kocio-pl]

I feel it's still too early, first we need some numbers to be sure.

[polarbearing]

I agree that university-yellow would be reasonable for a campus.
If it is just a building outline or just a node, how would the label look like?

[geozeisig]

amenity=university has no icon if it was mapped as a node or building. So I would say university-yellow and the name is enough.
If it's just a point or building you should use office=research. Which icon we use for that we should discuss in a new issue.

[matkoniecz]

amenity=university has no icon if it was mapped as a node or building.

In that case it is relatively unimportant and name should be sufficient.

[DnaX]

I will add some examples of the usage of amenity=research_institute in italy:

• CNR-Pisa: National Research Council: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23082352

• Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, one of the most important physics laboratories of the world: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/79401619

• Bruno Kessler Fondundation: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/813142998

They are closed areas with buildings, parking lots and various structures, such as schools or universities. But it can also be a single point where the structure is not recognizable as an area, like an "office" (but it is not an office) of a large building with other functions.

Ps. now the global usage it's > 1k items.

[velikodsky]

Global usage is already growing faster. This year the number of uses has doubled (now ~ 1.5k). I suggest rendering like universities.

[polarbearing]

As I see none of the previous concern being valid anymore, please go ahead and render as discussed.

[jeisenbe]

Unfortunately the previous concerns appear to be valid still.

The features with this tag can be an office in a building, a building in a university or hospital, a campus of many office buildings, a campus with office buildings and industrial buildings, or an area of farmland which is used for “research”, in it’s many meanings.

I checked https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/130J for England, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and New Zealand.

Although there are some examples like the ones shown above, there is not one consistent type of meaning for this feature: some are within an amenity=university and are a building or several buildings or just an office in a University building with other functions.

There are only a half-dozen in all of Southwest England, including London, Oxford and Cambridge, surprisingly. Often they are just small offices like the “Overseas Development Institute”: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/7205812400 https://www.odi.org - or https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/8287236858 the "Thrombosis Research Institute” in the National Heart and Lung building: https://www.tri-london.ac.uk/

There is an Institute of Zoology building with this tag in the London Zoo: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/40234936

This building in the Wellcome Genome Centre is the "Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute” - https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/9398629 - but the whole campus is landuse=commercial (https://www.wellcomegenomecampus.org/)

Near Oxford, the "Diamond Light Source Synchrotron” is tagged - https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/548974 - but the surrounding area is landuse=industrial with the name Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and the larger area is the Harwell campus - it seems to contain non-profit research institutes as well as commercial / industrial businesses: https://www.harwellcampus.com/organisation-list/

The Pera Business Park appears to be an office building but it’s tagged amenity=research_institute: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/221951953 - https://www.perabusinesspark.co.uk

Robert Aitken Institute for Clinical Research is within a hospital campus, sharing a building with the Haematology department: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/7207998548

Kroto Research Institute is tagged both amenity=research_institute and office=university and it’s within the Univeristy of Sheffield: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/201385725

Others are clearly industrial areas with large works (factory) buildings which happen to be used for developing new industrial processes. E.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/8346073097 "Fair-Fusion” inside of a Emmtec Emmen industrial chemical area -https://chemicalparks.eu/companies/emmtec

And there are examples where the area is farmland which happens to be used for agricultural investigations: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/197943816 - related to https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/874675602#map=18/50.98056/3.77901 (Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food) - https://ilvo.vlaanderen.be/en

Many of these research institutes are partners with Universities and some actual have classrooms:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/798023590 - https://www.field-studies-council.org/locations/eppingforest/ - “The purpose built, fully accessible Centre has six classrooms, and associated facilities, with direct access into our teaching sites which include woodland, grassland, heath and river. Most of our teaching sites are fully accessible."

This is a couple of buildings in the middle of a proteced moor (heathland) accessible via a track: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/836619083 "Moor House”

“Dairy Campus”, a research dairy producing milk products in the Netherlands - https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/678477984 - https://www.dairycampus.nl/en/Home.htm "At Dairy Campus innovative projects and activities are carried out in order to generate new information and knowledge to drive innovation in the dairy chain.”

So as @imagico had noted before, this tag is used for all kinds of places which might be called an “institute”, whether they are parts of a University or part of an Industrial facility, or separate. And it is used for many features which are focused on research, whether it is basic scientific research, or agricultural development, or industrial processes improvement, or commercial research, etc.

[1ec5]

Indeed, these research facilities are in quite a range of settings. However, at a glance, it doesn’t seem that much more diverse than amenity=college or amenity=university facilities, some of which are just a few rooms in a building and some of which constitute an entire town. One of the larger ones I’ve mapped is a radio observatory. It even has an airstrip on site. Counterintuitively, much of the site does render, due to a protected area (protecting against radiointerference), but that zone is known by a different name and isn’t as well-known.

[dieterdreist]

sent from a phone

On 31 Jan 2021, at 23:39, Joseph E ***@***.***> wrote: The features with this tag can be an office in a building, a building in a university or hospital, a campus of many office buildings, a campus with office buildings and industrial buildings, or an area of farmland which is used for “research”, in it’s many meanings.

an area of farmland isn’t an “institute” though, nor are buildings (but they can house institutes, and with ambiguous shortcut tagging it could be tagged together with a building tag set, so they might be “ok”) It’s ok if there are different scales of the same thing (an office in a building vs. a campus with several buildings)

[polarbearing]

Most of the alleged inconsistencies are generic mapping mistakes and could be cited for lots of objects.

Imagine the following scenario: Assume amenity=school is not rendered and proposed to do so, and now we get inconsistencies reported that sometimes a campus is mapped, sometimes a building and sometimes just a node in a building for a driving school. Would that stop us from rendering schools?

Some reseach facilities tagging might be misplaced, or some have other landuse tags to force them being rendered - we have this style as feedback to the mappers, including to reveal mistakes.

[matkoniecz]

and sometimes just a node in a building for a driving school. Would that stop us from rendering schools?

If that would be popular - then yes.

including to reveal mistakes.

This type of mistake would not be revealed.

[polarbearing]

Research and education are interwoven, there is no sharp boundary in reality, as @jeisenbe' analysis has shown. Thus objects might carry both taggings, research facilities might be placed on university campuses, research facilities might have some seminar rooms. All these mixtures. Yes.
This is the reason the identical rendering was proposed. Anyway there are research institutes that are not universities, some of them geographically quite large, and they are denied rendering. Strange.

[AgusQui]

It already has more than 2000 uses https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/amenity=research_institute#overview, How many do you need to decide to render?

[velikodsky]

It should be rendered.

[vachan-maker]

Hi
Research Institute is still not rendered
Example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1033208665

[matkoniecz]

Research Institute is still not rendered

Yes, which is already indicated by fact that this issue is open.

[vachan-maker]

haha😁
I thought this issue is declined because of the decline tag on this issue

[matkoniecz]

Oh, good point! It was not removed on reopening it

[bgo-eiu]

I support this!

[BryannaM]

Use continues to grow it is well above 3,000 and it drives me nuts facilities like NBAF don't render. NBAF is a very significant facility. There might not be a huge number in total of these types of facilities because the ones there are are significant.

[nc011]

We are now at >3,600 uses of this tag and it has an iD editor preset. The wiki page documents this tag as de facto (though that was a fairly recent edit). It seems to me this is distinct enough from office=research (e.g., you wouldn't tag NASA GSFC as an office).

I support rendering. Suggest rendering in the same fashion as a university.

[maro-21]

4599 uses (2024-05-05)

This is one of the few commonly used tags for which I miss the rendering. Since such institutes often cover large areas, people purposely use other tags just to make them appear on the map. Frequently used substitutes are amenity=university or landuse=commercial. Many research instututes in my city don't have this tag, precisely for this reason - because they have amenity=university.
Is there anything preventing you from adding this rendering?

[imagico]

Is there anything preventing you from adding this rendering?

Views of OSM-Carto maintainers have been explained in:

#2077 (comment)
#2077 (comment)

If anything of substance has changed in mapping practice since then please present that here.

The key research=* has been introduced and is used 773 times now but it only provides thematic differentiation, meaning it provides information on the topic of research, not the type of research activity practiced (i.e. it does not allow distinguishing between farmland used for agricultural research, a research lab doing analytics and a bunch of offices).

office=research is used 12.5k times - no clear semantic delineation seems to exist in either practical use or documentation between that and amenity=research_institute.

[scaidermern]

office=research is used 12.5k times - no clear semantic delineation seems to exist in either practical use or documentation between that and amenity=research_institute.

Usually research institutes - at least the ones that I know - consist of many different offices and often contain related facilities (laboratories, sometimes smaller lecture halls, common areas like dining rooms used by different research groups together etc). There is no other known tag to me that would fit here.

[novolife]

I'm shocked that this repo guys can refuse to such an important feature because of some insignificant "problems", and even consider that they are protecting justice and we're the evil guy who want to destroy the "beautiful" carto. Honestly I won't give a shit on this style if it's not the default rendering of osm.

[dreua]

@novolife I've been thinking about a fork recently, there is a handful of issues very similar to this where I feel very similar to what you said. We should probably find a different space to discuss this further and not hijack this issue here.

[TonyJC99]

I tagged multiple campuses as being government-owned research institutes and was shocked to see that they've yet to be given the yellow "education" render on the OSM map. This is now an 8 year old issue apparently! Yes, these campuses exist and hold multiple buildings in them with differing purposes. No, they're not universities nor owned by them. In the case of my use for them, these are owned by government ministries, and I'm sure that there are a variety of them that can vary from the public and private sector.

I do believe that this tag, as a landuse and amenity, is justified in being rendered, not only because of its nature, but also because its use is still increasing year by year. It now has 4.5k uses, and still shows robust growth, despite the fact that some people apparently wish to undervalue its use despite the fact that it's not buildings we're talking about here, but whole plots of land!

[dch0ph]

office=research is used 12.5k times - no clear semantic delineation seems to exist in either practical use or documentation between that and amenity=research_institute.

Usually research institutes - at least the ones that I know - consist of many different offices and often contain related facilities (laboratories, sometimes smaller lecture halls, common areas like dining rooms used by different research groups together etc). There is no other known tag to me that would fit here.

I agree with the argument here. There are lot of research institutes of all shapes and sizes, but the merit of using the same area (but not building) rendering as education-focussed organisations is that it focusses on the larger better-defined institutes.

I think the office=research tag is much more confused. It seems to be used for individual laboratories or departments within something bigger:

[Here the Kroto Research Institute has been tagged as office=university, probably to get a name rendered. ]

Hence it is not surprising that there are lots of office=research, but frankly these are much less interesting / important than research institutes.

I have reviewed the comments made by Carto maintainers above, but I don't find the arguments convincing against the specific proposal of rendering in the same way as educational institution, not least because it is irrelevant whether a particular entity does research and/or teaching.

The objection that farmland can be part of a research institute is also unconvincing. If you have an enclosed land parcel that is part of a "campus", then it is part of the institute. If it is some random field operated by a research institute, then it is not.