[Imports] Oahu, Hawaii CDP boundaries

stevea steveaOSM at softworkers.com
Sun Sep 15 19:36:24 UTC 2019


On Sep 15, 2019, at 12:22 PM, Brian M. Sperlongano <zelonewolf at gmail.com> wrote:
(below).

Amazing!  Not five seconds after I hit Send on my reply to Brian, I received his reply before he got MY reply!

> Thinking this through further and re-reading the discussion and key=place wiki (with apologies for the stream of consciousness), I think I'd propose the following (3 times a charm?) which should be consistent with OSM guidelines and on the ground reality:

No apologies necessary for stream-of-consciousness.  This is good dialog and a Sunday mid-day seems to have tightened up the interactivity of our comm-loop.  Before it was taking days or weeks (and we got a mention on weeklyOSM #477), now it's taking hours, even minutes!

> Honolulu County = admin level 6
> Neighborhood boards = admin level 10
> 
> There would be no admin relations between 6 and 10, and all the neighborhood boards would be nested relations directly within the county with no levels in between.
> 
> Honolulu would have its boundary=administrative and admin_level=8 removed, its polygon fixed to be consistent with real-world usage, and tagged simply as place=city (with outline and place node at the urban center). 
> Other similar places with clear boundaries would get place=town.or place=city as appropriate.  Also, none of these areas would use the boundary tag since they don't meet the description of any of the current boundary= options.

But Brian, there really IS a city called Honolulu, which is properly tagged boundary=administrative and admin_level=8, and I believe it is coterminous with Oahu's similar one tagged admin_level=6.  (The existing Honolulu is a vestigial mess and imo could use much improvement if not outright replacement).  YES, I agree with you that this likely flies in the face of locals, yet it is politically accurate and would be represented as such in OSM if entered this way (just like any of dozens of other CCCs in the USA which are also tagged this way, notwithstanding that "locals might hold their nose but admit the truth of it."

I do agree with your "other similar places with clear boundaries would get place=town" with the exception of the word "similar" as I think it smears (beyond recognition) what you mean.  I also stopped quoting you at "town" because I don't agree with what follows, "place=city as appropriate."  To me, it does not seem appropriate that there are any cities in the county of Oahu besides the single city of Honolulu, which which it shares a coterminous boundary with Oahu.  Yes, that seems "wrong to locals," yet it IS correct (to political scientists and OSM boundary=* junkies like me).  As I've said, ADDITIONALLY, it makes a great deal of sense to assuage locals' sensibilities with "other...places with clear boundaries would get place=town."  Brian, a good start is to add nodes tagged place=town on such places, refining them to be more-formal (multi)polygon boundary data as these become known.

> I briefly considered the idea of having the aforementioned place boundaries be nested boundaries within the place=island boundary for Oahu, but this doesn't work due to the existence of slightly off-shore islands such as Sand Island or Ford Island which are connected by bridges.

The topology allows this, if you really wanted to.  But what you mean by "nested" is captured by (multi)polygons which are themselves topologically inside of others, and then we allow the tagging of admin_level (and its ascending or descending values, depending on whether you are figuratively zooming in or out) to "do the rest."

Still engaged, still listening, still interested in your (and others') input on these topics,
SteveA


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