[Talk-GB] Boundaries ...

[Colin Smale]

"CP" is part of the name in the OS Boundary-Line data. There doesn't 
seem to be any consensus or guidelines about what to put in the "name" 
tag. Should it be "Dartford" or "Dartford Borough" or "Borough of 
Dartford" or "Dartford Council" or something else? Is it naming the 
area, or the administrative entity governing it? As there are very many 
cases of areas at many levels named identically, from counties down to 
parishes, there needs to be some way of distinguishing between them.

We have to watch out that we continue to distinguish distinct, unrelated 
"hierarchies". In particular "parish" and "ward" mean different things 
according to the context. There are civil parishes, which are (by 
definition) a subarea of a higher-level local authority (normally 
district/borough or unitary authority) and ecclesiastical parishes: each 
religion/denomination has its own hierarchy of areas. The NHS has a 
geographic hierarchy as has Fire and Rescue. But they have only a 
certain correlation to governmental areas, with cases of one fire 
service serving multiple counties, and a counties being covered by 
multiple fire services (although I don't have an example of this to hand).

An area at admin level 10 might be a civil parish, it might be an 
ecclesiastical parish, it might be an electoral ward etc etc. To me, 
boundary=administrative means the boundary belongs to "government", 
which means it starts at level 2 with countries (leaving room for 
supra-national levels such as the EU) and includes regions, counties, 
unitary authorities, districts and civil parishes. Wards in this 
hierarchy should really be at admin level 11 (i.e. inferior to 
parishes). There are some special cases which don't fit the 100%: the 
Scilly Isles and City of London spring to mind. There is a hierarchy of 
parliamentary-electoral areas as well; the lowest quantum is the "ward" 
but these are not the same as the wards for local council purposes.

There are many "unparished" areas. Many of these correspond to former 
local authorities in urban areas. A civil parish has (normally) a parish 
council, but unparished areas do not. There is no administrative entity 
for these areas at that level - they are governed directly from above 
(district/unitary level). However many of these areas are still tagged 
as if the former LA still existed.

I and some other users have started to use "designation" to further 
qualify the tagging. Adding designation=civil_parish makes it 
unambiguous; admin_level=10 also gets used for "towns" which are not CPs 
(official Town Councils are actually CPs by another name). You might 
think of doing something similar with Westminster electoral wards - they 
are not "by definition" the same as council wards. In any case they 
should IMHO not be boundary=administrative but boundary=political.

Colin

On 23/09/2012 15:41, Lester Caine wrote:
> OK
> I'm buried deep into this and getting totally lost ...
>
> I'm using http://layers.openstreetmap.fr/ to check what needs doing
>
> We have 'admin?' levels
>
> 5=Regions ... so West Midlands
> 6=Counties ... But Manchester and some Welsh ones are missing?
> 7=Not used ... But I wonder if 'Unitary Authorities' might be better 
> here?
> 8='Districts' ... But I'm not sure WHAT is currently set here?
> Should this be 'local_authority'?
>
> 9=Not Used
> 10=Parish ... Has some way to go, but why is CP appended to some areas 
> and not others? The files I've checked have CP as part of the title so 
> should we not standardise on that?
>
> The French have added a separate 'local_authority'
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dlocal_authority
> But we have been having a discussion on the main talk list about them 
> doing their own thing ;)
> We could legitimise that by using it?
>
> I then have
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dpolitical
> With political_division of:
> parl_const
> county_division
> ward
>
> But we only seem to have a very small number of wards loaded?
>
> My immediate 'need' is to add a couple of constituencies and their 
> wards , but I'm having trouble unravelling the 9 different data sets 
> in the Boundary Line set.
> I think I need 'district_borough_unitary_ward_region' for the wards, 
> but is it then 'westminster_const_region' for the constituency 
> boundaries?
>
> Next step is what has already been converted and who is already adding 
> stuff ...
> I've located 'county', district' and 'parish' but I assume that I need 
> to process the ward data myself :)
>