[OSM-talk-be] boundary names and my program

[A.Pirard.Papou]

On 2012-11-29 09:23, Jan-willem De Bleser wrote :
> On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 4:51 AM, A.Pirard.Papou 
> <A.Pirard.Papou at gmail.com <mailto:A.Pirard.Papou at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     I have presented this to tagging at osm, and I think I mentioned it
>     on talk-be at osm:
>
>     The municipality (L8=level 8) border segments (ways between two
>     municipalities) should be assembled with multilinestring to form
>     arrondissement L7 border segments.
>     Then, the border of the arrondissement are now a much smaller
>     number of L7 segments.
>     We may do the same at higher levels.
>     The L8 borders are tagged admin_level=8, name=municipalityA —
>     municipalityB
>     The L7 borders are tagged admin_level=7, name=arrondissementA —
>     arrondissementB
>     The L6 borders are tagged admin_level=6, name=provinceA — provinceB
>     and so on for upper levels or lower levels if they exist.
>
>     And then the meaningless saying "the highest admin_level wins"
>     goes away by itself, especially when applied to names for which
>     there is no reason to apply that rule.
>
>     THAT is consistent, coherent, compatible, congruous, harmonious, 
>     homogeneous, logical, solid, sound, straightforward, uniform,  you
>     name it.
>
>     But... no answer that proposition.
>
>
> You're right, that does solve the "which layer?" problem. If you 
> mentioned that earlier in the thread, I'm sorry, I must have missed it.
>
> The problem I have, however,  is that by using name=A-B, you're trying 
> to give the boundaries a name when it really is the municipalities 
> that have a name.
>
> To use your example above, what if the L8 boundaries are all members 
> of multipolygon relations, each with the name of a municipality, the 
> L7 members of multipolygons named after arrondissements, and so on. If 
> you have the border, it is a single api call to find which relations 
> it is a member of, and then you can easily extract the name. This is 
> pretty much what they suggest on the wiki (well, that or left: and 
> right: tags). I assume your program could do that extra query without 
> difficulty? Should be easy in Josm as it grabs any relation in the 
> bounding box, but I'll have to take a look at Potlatch to see if it's 
> possible there.
>
> Essentially, I don't want to have to "agree" on a name, I want to use 
> the one that's already there.
When I started to map Belgian boundaries, I looked for instructions on 
the Belgian pages and I found none.  So, I looked at what was being 
done, I saw that names were used on boundaries and I did the same.  And 
now I am /*accused of *//*insisting*/ to put names on the borders when I 
found them that way.

If I look at the result of the way it is done, I see nameA — nameB name1 
name2 name3 name4 ... everywhere, sometimes being a municipality, 
sometimes being an arrondissement, sometimes being a province etc... 
without any clue for the map reader to know which is which.  And Namur 
or Liège can be three different types.
The result of my view of the Boundaries is that, instead of seeing this 
on the border
Liège — Namur  Havelange  Huy  Namur Dinant  Clavier Liège
one would see
Clavier — Havelange    Huy — Dinant (arr.)    Liège —Namur (prov.)
beside the unavoidable pile of shit.
To  this, I'm answered that the pile of shit is very well the way it is. 
That the nec plus ultra is a renderer taking the name (but not the 
admin_level!) off the municipality relation without the faintest notion 
of what are the names to be used for distinguishing admin levels.  And 
one will certainly not miss the occasion to roll out the refrain that I 
want to tag for the rendering.

I, who would certainly be glad to map any community border like the 
Quartier des Marolles, am accused of not considering them as 
administrative borders because they can be used as postal addresses and 
of not mapping level 10 names everywhere.

I just read a question of someone wanting to navigate down the boundary 
tree.  I do it, but the answer he received is that it is not possible.  
It goes on..
> Basically everything is "free-form" in OSM. There are conventions on 
> tagging, but there is no guarantee people will stick to them.
>
My own opinion is indeed that it's difficult and unreliable to obtain 
data from OSM.
But, after reading for boundaries that one does it that way and the 
other another way and even in Belgium that they are nor doing it the way 
they say they must do it,  I have serious doubts about existing 
conventions too, conventions allowing to scan the tree here and not there.

The net result of this is that I'm losing my time writing messages in 
hope of doing something right, that I hate doing things wrong and that, 
in consequence I'm leaving the boundary business.

I will finish as perfectly as possible, as I did before, what I have 
promised to do.

I started my boundary work by fixing borders that were 250 m away from 
their position and putting Banneux that was in arr. Verviers in arr. Liège.

Don't forget to fix the other ugly, huge offsets in Belgian borders.

Cheers,

André.




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