[Tagging] Meaning of "administrative" in boundary=administrative, in your country?

[Colin Smale]

On 2020-05-14 04:02, Andrew Harvey wrote:

> Agreed with Phake, any boundary that's used for administrative purposes could be included, that's what I understand from https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dadministrative. That doesn't mean that each area needs to have it's own legal entity and administrator, nor need to be able to set laws, rules, codes etc. just that the boundary itself is used for some administrative purposes.

I would suggest a filter that the area needs to be formally defined,
possibly by some level of government. I agree that whether or not there
is any active form of local government is not a prerequisite. But we
need to draw the line somewhere.... If a group of neighbours got
together and said "our area is called Homesville" would that qualify? If
a company with a huge plant divided the campus into North, South, East
and West with Regional Managers, it is using the areas for
"administrative purposes" but I would not expect this to be reflected in
OSM as admin boundaries. 

As with everything in OSM it should be "independently verifiable" which
implies there should be some publicly accessible single source of truth,
i.e. the definition of the area is written down somewhere that Joe
Bloggs or I could access freely. 

In the UK there are multiple hierarchies of geographic areas, for widely
differing purposes, that frequently (but not always and not necessarily)
share borders. For example Police Regions are based on traditional
counties (which are not "administrative") with lots of anomalies. They
are subdivided into districts. Calling these areas
"boundary=administrative" instead of "boundary=police" would cause
confusion! 

The use of admin_level=* allows a proper hierarchy to be defined, but is
currently only used with boundary=administrative. If this concept is
extended into (for example) boundary=police, you enable a parallel
hierarchy, which reflects real life much better and keeps things clearer
for both mapper and user.
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