[Talk-GB] Authorities, boundaries and admin-levels

[Ed Loach]

> And here is the current OSM guidance:-
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:admin_level#admin_level
> 
> In order to tie in with NUTS and with guidance for other
> countries
> within OSM we might want to do the following for England
> (Scotland
> and Wales would be similar but would skip some levels):-
> 
> UK (admin_level=2)
> England/Wales/Scotland (admin_level=4)
> English regions (North East, East of England etc) (also
> admin_level=4
> as per NUTS)
> Ceremonial counties - where they exist (admin_level= 5)
> County Councils/Unitary Authorities (admin-level=6)
> Districts  (admin-level=8)  districts / London boroughs /
> metropolitan
> boroughs.

These suggestions look to me to retain the existing levels while
adding regions at 4, and ceremonial counties at 5. Reading the
information about NUTS it seems sensible to have regions at the same
level as the Wales/England/Scotland admin level, though before
reading that I was tempted to suggest we move them to 3 to
distinguish them. We could still do that of course and have
admin_levels 3 and 4 equating to one NUTS level. 

Looking at the link about the current admin levels I noticed Turkey
in the table just above UK and they have the NUT1 to 5 (now I
understand NUTS1 to NUTS3 and LAU1/LAU2) at different admin levels
to what we're proposing. I think it would make sense if we could
standardise across Europe if we are going to do anything with NUTS
levels but I'm not sure how we'd manage that. A quick scroll and
Spain, Sweden, Hungary, Germany and Czech Republic all seem to have
different NUTS levels implementations. Perhaps it is the case that
NUTS levels, designed mainly for statistics, does have different
admin level mappings in different countries? In fact that is what
the table here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUTS#Levels
suggests is the case, so I think we let other countries worry about
their admin levels and concentrate on ours. 

So, yes, as this proposal doesn't seem to change anything, but just
adds regions and ceremonial counties at what look like sensible
places, I think it looks OK. Although I see the later post about
ceremonial and use the same admin level as county, which looks OK
too.

Ed