I am a first semester student and I’m very motivated to make a lot of participation at my school. I am enrolling in clubs and being very active.
I’d like my college to have every building named, there’s usually a lot of confusion with new students finding places, and rooms and I’d help so much if like other places I’d have how many floors each building has and/or the name of the building, where campus police is located, all of that information.
My first idea was to approach the IT department, and see if they could get a my business account for the school (which I think would be the solution), I really don’t know how places like this get mapped and labeled. Like malls and hospitals.
Also my school has a partnership with Microsoft, so I don’t know if that’d prevent them from doing this.
What advice do you guys give me to approach this situation or how is it possible to get this done?, if there’s a way I can do it.
But I think it is important that you get some backing from staff/management so someone are willing to be responsible in the long run after you graduated.
If I understand correctly, what you are looking for is to have all departments, or building, added on the maps as a separate POIs of the same College.
Like to have a map of the hospital wards. They are part of the same business, but they have a different position, maybe different visit hours, etc…
My feeling is that we need to be careful in starting to add POIs in there, if we don’t know the exact implication of what we are doing.
On the other side, I would like to know the answer by myself, for being able to reduce the confusion in the hospital in my city, where it is very easy to get lost.
I strongly agree with @MortenCopenhagen that you should talk to the appropriate staff at your college first. There are negative consequences to have multiple listings for the different departments, faculties, etc. of the same institution.
Besides more work to maintain these multiple listings (with correct and relevant information), and the increased chance that data does not get managed properly, there is the issue of people (Maps Users) not appreciating the difference between the additional listings. Reviews and photos will end up at the wrong sub-listing and the whole point of separating them gets lost. Also, since the Maps algorithm decides which POI the show on the screen of a user, it could happen that the main listing ends up getting less priority against potentially causing confusion. The naming of the departments is thus very important to get right!
Alternatively to mapping departments, building names could be mapped by Google on a different Map Layer. If you know the source of the base map for your area, you could achieve this by asking the official regional cartography organization to add the building names. Certainly, something to do together with the backing/support of the institution and not on your own. The advantage of building names is that you can navigate to them, the name is visible on the map, but they don’t have opening hours, reviews or can be claimed (and abused).
I suggest that you study some existing similar educational institutions on Google Maps and evaluate what you observe and learn from it.
Here is an example of a Building Name with a duplicate POI next to it. The zoology laboratory is close to Harvard University, where all buildings seem to have their own “university department” listing with reviews and all.
Not relevant to this discussion, but nevertheless interesting is a different type of building listing that I have identified. Not fully sure how this works with Map Layers, but check out the Rockefeller Building in New York. You will notice that people can add businesses to the building, but the building itself is not a normal POI.
I’ve been tagged into this thread by @ErmesT as I’m a Maps Product Expert and can let you know what is and isn’t permitted.
There is no need to approach the school itself if you’d like to make the contributions; Google is not going to look at the email address to determine if they will approve the edits. The only reason you might approach them is to encourage them to use the Maps Content Partners program. To use this program they must have the data in an appropriate digital format and be willing to donate it; in other words they must already be digitally mapping the campus using a GIS system.
For you to map the campus you should know the following:
In the end there should only be one single POI that has the category college or university (depending which one is appropriate). I mention this because people sometimes try to add things that don’t have a different category available by reusing the college or university category. If there’s no category available then you likely cannot add it; not everything is mappable.
The public does not currently have access to name building polygons. If you did, the rules of naming are complicated; you’d only be able to add actual names and not descriptions. Something like “Building 5” would be a description, while something like “John Smith Memorial Hall” would be a proper name. At a typical college over half the buildings cannot be named with the designations the use when describing where classes are held, so a custom map is then more appropriate.
Individual rooms cannot be added using POIs. They were added in some places using Indoor Mapping, but Google currently is not offering new entries into that program.
Individual departments can be mapped if they meet certain criteria. They need to have their own, defined space on campus (such as an office), their own staff, perhaps their own hours, perhaps their own URL, and most importantly they must have their own phone number. If one phone number is used for the entire campus then you cannot map departments. Examples of things that might qualify are the campus police, the Department of Chemistry, and the Physical Plant.
I mentioned customs maps above. This is often the best solution for such a situation. You would first get what is permitted added directly in Maps using Send Feedback. You would then use a solution such as Google My Maps to add everything that can’t be on the base map. On a custom map you can add every building even if it’s a description, you can add room names if they exist, you can add departments that don’t quite meet the criteria to be mapped separately, etc. My Maps can be made public and can be made searchable in Google Search, so a well designed map will come up when people are searching for things.
I’ve highlighted your post and profile on the