[OSM-talk-be] Fixing administrative borders

[Kurt Roeckx]

On Wed, Jun 08, 2011 at 11:04:56AM +0200, Ben Laenen wrote:
> Ralf Hermanns wrote:
> > I think there is conflicting information here:
> > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dadministrative and here:
> > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Belgium/Boundaries
> > 
> > On the Tag:boundary=administrative page (first link) it says
> > communities/provinces go on level 5 and arrondisments on 6 - while on the
> > subproject page it only list the language communites on level 5 and puts
> > provinces onto 6 (thereby moving arrondisments and towns further down)
> 
> Don't have much time to reply, so a short one:
> 
> Always look at the country specific page to get the answers. The international 
> page is just there for some "guiding", but the countries have to make their 
> own rules. As is the case for Belgium.
> 
> country: level 2
> regions: level 4
> communities: level 5
> provinces: level 6
> arrondissements: level 7
> municipalities: level 8
> district/deelgemeentes/sections: level 9

This is atleast how it used to be, and what I've always used.

I have some comments about this.

I think we should not map level 5, because it's more about people
than it is about land.  Brussels is part of both the Dutch and the
French community, and last time I looked at it, it was also
properly mapped like that.

Brussels is also special in that it doesn't belong to any
province.  So it ends up with no level 6 and 2 level 5s,
and a whole level 4 for itself.

But my biggest problem with level 5 is that it's not actually
a sublevel of 4, if mapped it would make more sense to be at
the same level as the regions.

And maybe we should map the 4 language regions too, if you
really want to go and map everything.

I also have a problem with level 7.  We have 3 tpes of 
arrondissements:
- Administrative (43 of them)
- Judicial (27 of them)
- Voting (depends)


I would also like to point out that the name of the tag implies
administration levels, so if you would want to map the
arrondissements, it should be the administrative level.  But
I'm not sure adding them to the map adds any value when using
the administrative level, as there isn't any real administration
at that level.

When only considering to map administrative levels, it would also
mean that you can't map any sub-municipalities at level 9 because
they don't have any administration, at least most don't.  But I do
think that mapping at level 9 where possible is useful.

Maybe some of those things shouldn't be mapped as an
administrative, but could be on the map with some other tag.


Kurt