[Tagging] Admin Boundary admin_centre or label roles

[tguen at tutanota.com]

Oct 1, 2021, 03:31 by ajt1047 at gmail.com:

> Likewise, anyone wanting to go to "the centre of Sheffield" would be disappointed if they were taken to roughly the centre of the relation, https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/106956#map=18/53.40125/-1.56590 .  I'm sure it's a lovely part of the world but it's a long way from Sheffield City Hall and the Crucible.
>
This makes sense for neighborhoods and cities, not so much for larger features like countries, states, or counties. In these cases, I just don't see any need for a node other than rendering a label. Where appropriate, boundary relations could have a node with a role that serves the same purpose. I agree that "label" is an unfortunate name and we could make a new role to replace it.

I'm not so familiar with administrative boundaries outside of the US, and this method of tagging may not be appropriate everywhere. I just don't think the current method is ideal. On the 'one feature, one OSM element' wiki page, it specifically mentions "an area object with a point object inside, both with the same tags representing the same real-world feature." While the tags aren't exactly the same, they are (at least in some cases) describing the same thing.

I think the issue with admin_level needs to be addressed. I can find municipalities as nodes by searching for place=city/town etc. How can I find the boundaries? admin_level doesn't work for this. It needs to be paired with another tag. If we're not going to put place=* on the same feature, then we need another. border_type is sometimes used for this. Should this tag be required on administrative boundaries?
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