[OSM-dev] country borders

[Tony Bowden]

Jon Burgess wrote:
> Now that I look again it seems we have little or no country border data
> rendered on zoom 7+. I think it probably is due to the lack of OSM data
> for country borders. It is not something you can easily record with a
> GPS though so we probably need to find and import it from a suitable
> source.

Maybe it's a good thing that we don't have it yet? The list of disputes
over territory and borders is very large[1]. As much as possible we want
to avoid making political decisions, and have the map just reflect
'reality' (even if this requires coping with multiple realities.)

There are at least two distinct issues with borders:

1) Where to draw them
2) How to name the territories on each side

Each carries perils and pitfalls.

We've had some discussion before on the latter (e.g. North/South Cyprus,
(Former Yugoslav (Republic of (Macedonia))), although as an aside I'll
throw out that I don't think we want to render _country_ names as much
as territory names: it's a little too confusing for most people when
France has a land border with Brazil...)

I haven't seen any discussion on the former, however. (Feel free to
point me at previous discussion if I've just missed it). I haven't given
a lot of thought to this, but I suspect that for each border between two
countries we'll need to try to find a source of border data from each
side of it. Where those agree things will be simple. But for the cases
where they won't we'll probably need a way of storing both (and
rendering them, although of course that's a distinct issue).

If we're going to do a bulk upload from somewhere it might be worth
having thought some of this through first. If it turns out to not be an
issue, then great. But it might stop us having to retag all the borders
later to allow for a different approach, or something.

Tony

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_disputes