Putting Colleges on the Map
MapBox's OSM Sprint comes to a Campus near you
In recent weeks, the MapBox team has participated in a mapping sprint to improve areas of the world that lack coverage in OpenSteetMap. Since starting our mapping sprint, we have traced streets, buildings and parks in highly populated, under-mapped areas of the world like Mexico, Brazil, Bangkok and drought stricken West Africa
Our first major mapping push in the US has been to add building footprints to college campuses in OpenStreetMap. We prioritized building footprints because that's the place where students check in the most on Foursquare, which now uses MapBox Streets. But where to find colleges that need tracing? We figured we should find to schools where students' spend more time on their phones than on their studies: party schools.
We started by researching Playboy's Top Ten Party Schools and found a handful of campuses that lacked building footprints and pathways in OSM. Then, we combed through all US colleges with more than 25,000 students, from US News and World Reports National University Ranking and emerged with a list of about 20 universities that needed additional features. We started in on these schools and here are some of the results.
With almost 29,000 students, Loisiana State had almost no buildings on the map.
Closeup of University of Central Florida's Athletic Facilities. UCF has over 50,000 students.
While adding building and footpath traces to OSM, we reached out to these schools in order to get permission to add building names to OSM based on their online maps. This ended up working remarkably well. We received some great feedback and learned exciting things about ongoing campus mapping projects in the process. University of Oregon, for instance, is beginning a program where geography students will update and maintain the University's buildings, paths, and roads in OpenStreetMap. Some schools like University of Delaware and the University of Maryland are already using OSM as the base layer for their online campus maps. As OSM becomes increasingly easy to edit and customize, we hope to see many other universities use and maintain the their campuses through OSM.
We were pleasantly surprised that the majority of US universities had excellent OSM coverage. This gives us confidence of the sustainability of OpenStreetMap as a comprehensive world base layer for years to come. With the rapid growth we've seen in the last few months, OSM is here to stay.
If your alma mater's campus is missing on OpenStreetMap, you can easily become a contributor to OSM and add your favorite campus buildings to the map. All you have to do is sign up and follow our directions to begin editing. Once you have JOSM downloaded and running, trace any necessary footpaths and use the buildings tool to trace university buildings. To do this go to JOSM's Preferences, select the plug-ins tab and add the “buildings” plug-in.
If you know the building names, you can add them. If you don't you can always try emailing your university to get permission to use their campus map as a naming reference. After you have the buildings and names added, upload changes, and now your campus is on the map!