Searching for part of a university name

[boothym]

Came across this note: https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/2384794

https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/search.html?q=University+of+the+West+of+Scotland

Like the person who opened the note, I would have expected Nominatim to find the university (and others containing the search term): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/4543895

But it seems like Nomination is looking for an exact match of the search term, rather than finding universities in OSM which begin with or contain the search term?

I also searched for other universities and colleges which had "- XYZ Campus" in their name e.g. "ABC College - XYZ campus" and got similar results like a bus stop named "ABC College" but not the campus.

Is there anything that can or should be done with the OSM tagging? Or is this a Nominatim issue?

[mtmail]

Specifically for universities in Germany they're sometimes tagged as relation to collect the various campuses/faculties/buildings across a town, examples

https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/8727202
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/4745499
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1590189

[boothym]

Well that's seems to be the way to do it in a city, but in this case the campuses are a fair distance away. Here's an example: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/169e - should these be connected in a relation and would it help Nominatim?

I suppose the issue being highlighted is why does Nominatim not return a partial match for the university name with "- Campus" on the end?

[lonvia]

The wiki for amenity=university states very clearly that the tag is for the whole university not for individual campuses and I tend to agree. As a general rule, if the name contains multiple parts (here: university name + campus name) then there is a high probability that the tagging is off.

The discussion how to tag a campus vs. the whole of the university belongs to the tagging mailinglist, though.

[boothym]

Perhaps this is more of an issue about how Nominatim handles names with multiple parts?

For example, this town has two parts to its name but if I search for the either the first or second parts it doesn't find them: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=elie#map=15/56.1905/-2.8202

[lonvia]

With this kind of tagging there is only so much that Nominatim can do about it. See discussions about abuse of the name tag for hiking routes, power lines and railway lines. This kind of stuff shouldn't need fixing on the data consumer side. It doesn't scale in the long term.