[Tagging] Suggested way to map disputed country borders

[Andy Townsend]

On 06/05/2016 14:03, Marc Gemis wrote:
> there is already a proposal:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/DisputedTerritories
>
> m.
>

Well, there's a wiki page, but among other things it says "If, you feel 
cappabale to invent a tag system for such purposes, edit this page", so 
it's certainly not a complete proposal yet.

What I suspect would be really useful would be a summary of how people 
handle disputed boundaries in OSM around the world, and the reasoning 
behind what they have done.  Sometimes admin_level=3 is used, sometimes 
it isn't (and confusingly sometimes admin_level=3 is used for 
_non_disputed boundaries elsewhere.

I can try and put together the reasoning behind the current tagging 
where I've been involved on behalf of the Data Working Group, such as 
Kosovo, - giving a summary of the parties involved (often there are more 
than 2 sides to a dispute, and not all of them may be active in OSM), 
the state of the ground itself and how it fits with 
http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesInformation.pdf 
, and which of the resulting entities are "countries"** in any normally 
understood sense.

Its also worth mentioning the "International Boundaries" sub-forum 
http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=53173 , which is where 
most discussions of this sort of thing take place.  I'd suggest that any 
attempt to fix boundaries should at the very least be mentioned there, 
if only to avoid it getting reverted as suspected vandalism.

Most of the reports that the DWG gets about this sort of thing are 
inherently partisan, as are most of the help questions about it (e.g. 
https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/49587/indias-administrative-boundary-issue 
). It can be really difficult to separate loud but unrepresentative 
voices from the actual situation on the ground.

The problem with answering Rory's original question directly is that in 
OSM we try and "map what's on the ground", and don't map stuff that's 
never going to happen (for example, if a village thinks that it'd be 
really nice if there was a bypass around it, but there's no concrete 
proposal, no funding and no likelihood of it happening, we don't map 
that bypass).  A number of territory claims are for national historic 
pride reasons only and are unlikely ever to result in any changes to 
actual administrative boundaries*.  There are various examples of how 
people represent mutually incompatible facts to different groups of 
people - here's one for some areas around Russia 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Zverik/diary/21463 , and here's a 
description of a similar process for India 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/PlaneMad/diary/38176 .  At the data 
level both of these seem to be "get the data fro OSM, munge it in some 
way with some external data, and use that".  I'm sure there are more 
examples, and it'd be helpful to gather them together.

Best Regards,

Andy

* such as 
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/war-of-the-roses-row-erupts-as-yorkshire-688659 
(Saddleworth was historically in Yorkshire in England but is now 
administered from the west rather than the east).  I use Saddleworth as 
an example because (a) I'm from Yorkshire and know something about it 
and (b) it's thankfully less politicised than other similar disputes - 
no one is getting killed.

** there's a famous Frank Zappa quote 
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/frankzappa134155.html . 
Obviously that's fairly flippant, and "needing a beer" works well in 
Western places but less well elsewhere, but some of the questions ("is 
there a national sports body that e.g. organises football matches 
against other national sports bodies?"  "are there companies based there 
that pay taxes and support local infrastructure there") do help define 
what we mean by "country".