WikiProject Belgium/Conventions/EU institutions and bodies

EU institutions and bodies shall be tagged folllowing a convention to help OSM users to discover the EU institutions, expose them via the various name search APIs, and to generate easily maps of EU institutions and bodies. While the EU has buildings in many countries of the world, the majority is situated in Brussels. To begin with, the mapping efforts focuses on Brussels and therefore this page belongs to the WikiProject Belgium. A later move is not excluded.

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Context

For an in-depth overview of the European Union (EU), consider the Wikipedia Page of the EU. In short, the EU is an international governmental organisation consisting of a number of institutions with executive, legislative and judiciary functions, and a number of other bodies tasked with e.g. implementing specific policies.

Motivation

A convention to tag EU institutions and bodies has a number of advantages:

• People can easily geolocate the institutions. The EU institutions welcome many international guests and OSM can help those to find their way. For this, it is important that the locations can be found by the common names of the institutions and bodies. EU building names should also be integrated in OSM.
• Data of EU institutions and bodies can be automatically exported to create custom maps of EU institutions and bodies. Learn here more about querying EU countries using overpass turbo.

Challenges

• There is no existing convention on how to tag international governmental organisations (intergovernmental organisations) in OSM, however some standards have been in use in Brussels since 2015.
• The EU promotes diversity also in languages and most of its offices have names in various languages. On top of it, acronyms of institutions/bodies and buildings are used, which may again vary from one language to another.

Tagging

The following proposals stem from existing tagging practices, analogies drawn from similar objects, and extrapolation of descriptions of existing tags. Please use the discussion page to provide feedback.

Prefer to tag EU offices as POI and not as buildings, because often buildings can host more than one EU office or host also other shops/companies.

Buildings having a EU office

No EU specific tags on the building unless the entire building is operated by the EU.

If the entire building is managed by the EU, than consider the following tags:

Key	Example Value	Explanation
operator=*	European Parliament	Give the name of the operating body, e.g. the European Parliament (the English name applies).
operator:wikidata=*	Q8889	Give the Wikidata key of the operating body. You can find out the number from the Wikipedia page, which has a link to the wikidata object in the left panel.
short_name=* or building:name=*	MTS	The short name of the building according to the EU, so that the building can be found by its name.

POI for EU offices

POI for EU offices should be tagged as office=government and country=EU.

Only the EU office-specific tags are listed here, you can add more tags (contact details, accessibility, and more).

Key	Example Value	Explanation
name=*	EDPS	The short name of the office (in English), e.g. EDPS for European Data Protection Supervisor. For the most prominent institutions, like the Commission, the Parliament and the Council, the full name is preferred here.
name:en=*	European Data Protection Supervisor	The long name of the office. Please try to add names in all EU languages, available on their website
office=*	government	All EU offices are primarily governmental offices.
government=*	ministry	Parliament offices should be generally tagged as legislative and Commission offices, such as a "Directorate General", as ministry. Please check the documentation of government=* to find the most appropriate function.
country=*	EU	This tag is important, as it makes it easy to associate this government POI with the EU, exactly like embassies could be matched with a country.