[talk-au] admin_level, suburbs and rendering; should the order be updated?

[stevea]

On Nov 29, 2021, at 10:39 PM, Ewen Hill <ewen.hill at gmail.com> wrote:
> Indigenous nations/country
> I have a strong belief that we should allocate an entry around level three to six for indigenous country. There will be discussion on fuzziness of boundaries and ownership, a number of these have been resolved already by the Registered Aboriginal Parties (RAP) for an area however I don't see that being a huge issue. My key issue is appropriation of the country and area polygons for the ability for others to commercialise this or reduce the purchasing of indigenous materials.
> 
> I don't see that all RAPs and others would update the map, however I see having the ability to add this data and be able to index it, is important to OSM in Australia.

"Um," (he begins timidly)...

This is REALLY going to be different in Oz than USA, but please consider boundary=aboriginal_lands.  This tag is widely used, was voted upon with great acclaim and really "seems correct" (to my parochial view of things there).  It renders in Carto (same as boundary=protected_area + protect_class=24, but don't use that, please!) with a light tan color and a thicker outline at its edge, looks quite nice actually.

Also, this is QUITE complicated in the USA and I'm not sure if it applies there, but if even a whiff of it seems familiar, please consider this.  What we say in the USA about these lands is:

"Wikipedia states 'tribal sovereignty is a form of parallel sovereignty within the U.S. constitutional framework, constrained by but not subordinate to other sovereign entities,' where a map of the contiguous US (lower 48 states) with reservation lands excluded displays. In that light, admin_level=2 or even no admin_level=* may be appropriate on these (called "First Nations" in Canada, to give a neighboring flavor to the semantics). Several tagging solutions have been proposed, though many have challenges."

So, if there is anything like that in Australia's aboriginal_lands, the challenges to OSM's admin_level scheme are great, and so far, not completely "solved."  On the other hand, if these are indeed "sovereign," then you're in better luck than we are!  Really, this can be a challenging problem to solve (where there are "overlapping" or "shared" political areas and it isn't "neat, clean and easy" to delineate one from the other).

Best,
SteveA