[Tagging] Mapping time zones as geometries (relations)

Paul Johnson baloo at ursamundi.org
Mon Mar 6 16:51:17 UTC 2017


On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 10:42 AM, Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl> wrote:

> On 2017-03-06 17:21, Paul Johnson wrote:
>
> On Mar 5, 2017 18:30, "Frederik Ramm" <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
>    I would like to start a discussion about the mapping of time zones.
>
>
>
> What do you think?
>
>
> I'm generally opposed to mapping timezones in OpenStreetMap unless the
> tzdata maintainers are 100% on board.  Since timezones are a royal pain to
> keep track of, often changing 100+ times a year, on as little as a few
> hours notice in some cases.
>
>
> Do you mean territories switch to another timezone 100+ times a year, or
> that the details of the timezone (DST dates etc) change 100+ times a year?
> If it's the latter, it won't be a problem for OSM if we only store the TZ
> name. Looking at the archives of the tz-announce mailing list, there are
> only 1-2 actual changes per month which would affect OSM. I think there are
> more changes to admin boundaries than to timezones.
>

No, the maddening number of changes unrelated to DST.  Computerphile rather
accurately describes the situation
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY>.  I only have to deal with it
tertiarily in my line of work and it's still caused a lot of problems for
us as a company.


> In what way would the tzdata maintainers need to be "on board"?
>

Considering that group most closely tracks this, it would be best if we
worked very closely together on getting this data right.  A lack of close
collaboration would rather render having this data in OpenStreetMap
outdated very quickly.
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