UK 2016 Q1 Project: Schools

The first UK Quarterly Project for 2016 is Schools.

There are two strands to this project. The first is to remotely (armchair) map and get an increase in coverage of the number of schools. The second strand is for those who prefer surveying: existing school names change (e.g change to Academy Status, amalgamations); there will schools in OSM with no name, and with the advent of free schools, new ones will be appearing constantly.

So there's plenty to do over the next few months!

For more info see the kick off mailing list post.

Suggested process & tags

Tagging entrances to a school

Draw and tag the boundary polygon with a minimum of:

• amenity=school
• name=*

Add as many of these additional tags as you can / want to:

• one of:
  • ref:edubase=* (England, Wales, oddities; see [1])
  • ref:seedcode=* (Scotland; see [2])
  • ref:estyn=* (Wales; see [3])
  • ref:deniirn=* (Northern Ireland; see [4])
• wikidata=*
• website=*
• isced:level=*

Optionally, but preferably, draw the school buildings and tag:

• building=school

Finally add entrances:

• at least one entrance=main
• barrier=gate where appropriate
• other entrances where appropriate

Resources

You can use MapRoulette to help you find missing schools.

• Official schools data:
  • England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland.
  • Isle of Man data.
• Reports:
  • Comparison tool (OSM progress against official data for England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). See notes.
  • Report on tags applied to amenity=school features.
• Maps:
  • umap instance showing school points within a school polygon.
  • ITO World map of schools with and without a name tag.
  • Mapzen map of schools mapped only as a node.
• Other
  • We have a MapRoulette task which is ideal if you're struggling to find schools to map. It automatically selects a random school for you!
  • Dataset of amenity=school nodes within an amenity=school polygon (likely errors), polygon within polygon (likely errors), and amenity=school features within 100m of other schools (worth checking for errors). For more info see Frederik's initial email.
  • amenity=school tag documentation. Also see Education features
  • Wikipedia's list of schools in England - For comparison use only - remember don't import geodata from wikipedia (see Collaboration_with_Wikipedia)

Progress trackers

The School Edit Tracker showing school edits by Robert Whittacker

• School Edit tracker counts creations and modifications of nodes/ways with the amenity=school tag (not using #OSMSchool hashtag). Includes user rankings over all time + daily & hourly
• Daily report of amenity=school features as measured by TagInfo UK.
• The comparison tool (as above) also features as a progress tracker.
• Map of changesets with #OSMschools in the changeset comment.

Who's involved?

As of 20th February, 250 people have edited Schools in the UK or Ireland! For an always up to date value see here.

We can also look at the number of people who are using adding "#OSMSchools" in their changeset comments. The number of changesets is just for fun - some people edit one school per changeset, others may edit multiple schools. Data from 2016-01-30 was published on Mappa Mercia's blog.

The following table allows you to share comments with other users. For example, where are you mapping, how else are you helping. Feel free to add names and notes to this list.

Username	Comments / Notes
RobJN	Blogging and some remote mapping of the OL postcode area.
SK53	Set up the uMap instance linked above.
Robert Whittaker	Set up comparison website.
Pascal Neis	Provides stats on changesets with the #OSMschools tag.
Jnicho02	Brighton area
SpillerC	Done much of BD postcode, now tinkering with BB.
LollyMay	RH postcode, Crawley, Horsham & villages
blackadder	CW postcode, Cheshire
brianboru	West Midlands postcodes mainly B, WS, WV, DY will leave CV alone for the time being
lsces	WR, GL North, HR and LD ... now where next ...
EdLoach	CO postcode, but happy to share :)
southglos	GL, BS
LivingWithDragons	DH postcode, focusing near Durham city
ACM	PH and DD postcodes
lakedistrict	LA postcode, central/south Lakes
Amaroussi	WC and EC, and a part of N (for North London).
James Derrick	NE, DG postcodes as complete as possible, now working on OL
Gregory Williams	CT, ME, and TN postcodes in Kent and East Sussex.
MGSpiller	More or less done HX postcode.

Related projects

• Equivalent for schools in Belgium
• Mix'n'Match - DfE URNs - tool, with game interface, to add URNs to Wikidata, so that we can then match Wikidata items to OSM objects.
• Some ideas for future projects (just a list for now):
  • Health (hospitals, GP clinics etc).
  • RNLI stations (small number so may want to extend to include other rescue services).
  • Rivers (lots of jagged NPE data)
  • Focus on an under-mapped location.

Previous projects

See the list of UK Quarterly Projects