[Talk-GB] ref:hectares on admin boundary, and non-responsive mapper

[Warin]

On 8/15/2016 7:03 PM, Colin Smale wrote:
>
> Hi Will,
>
> Fully agree with you. I also tried to contribute to that changeset 
> discussion. If you hadn't reverted that admin level change, I would 
> have...
>
> Some of his ideas are on his diary pages [1] and my admin boundary 
> page [2].
>
> Colin
>
> [1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/alexkemp/diary
>
> [2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User_talk:Csmale/ukboundaries
>
> On 2016-08-15 10:41, Will Phillips wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> This user is currently adding admin_level=10 admin boundaries, which 
>> we use for civil parishes (or communities), to areas where no such 
>> administrative unit exists. To me this seems problematic because my 
>> understanding is that these are legal entities which either exist or 
>> they don't. Additionally, it makes OSM boundary data harder to use. 
>> If I run a query to find which boundaries a node is within, I'd only 
>> expect real admin boundary areas to be returned. The user is adding 
>> designation tags (designation=non-civil_parish) to indicate they 
>> aren't real, but this is undocumented and data users shouldn't have 
>> to check a secondary tag to find out whether a relation is a real 
>> civil parish or not.
>>
>> The aim seems to be to improve the results returned by Nominatim and 
>> other geocoders, but surely this is the wrong way to go about it.
>>
>> Here is an example of one of these non-civil parish relations 
>> covering the whole of the City of Nottingham, where no such 
>> administrative unit has ever existed: 
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6448042
>>
>> I have raised this issue with the user directly but the tone has 
>> turned unpleasant and to me feels quite threatening.  I accept my 
>> initial comment suggesting that one of these relations should be 
>> deleted could have been worded much more tactfully, but I don't feel 
>> in justifies his aggressive responses since. I was frustrated at 
>> finding one of the these non-existent boundaries covering my local 
>> area with an inaccurate name.
>>
>> Will
>>
>> On 15/08/2016 08:39, Colin Smale wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I noticed a number of new admin boundaries have been tagged with 
>>> ref:hectares=* with the numeric value giving the area of the entity 
>>> in hectares. This feels to me like an inappropriate use of "ref" and 
>>> also redundant as the area can be calculated simply from the 
>>> geometry anyway. When I queried this with the mapper (user alexkemp) 
>>> via a changeset discussion [1] I got the following response:
>>>
>>> "This is an automated response: sorry, but I'm too busy mapping too 
>>> be able to spare the time to respond to you. Thank you for your 
>>> interest in my mapping. -Alex Kemp"
>>>
>>> Any thoughts about the tagging?
>>>
>>> Any thoughts about engaging the user? There is also a discussion on 
>>> another one of his changesets where he unilaterally diverged from 
>>> the established tagging [2].
>>>
>>> Colin
>>>
>>> [1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/41449409
>>>
>>> [2] http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/41371134
>>>

He is active on his diary pages .. and they make entertaining reading 
and are sometimes informative.

_Area..._
Regarding the ref:hectares ... humm while the area might be calculated 
correctly for a 'flat' area .. most have slopes ... don't know if that 
is officially included in area calculations :) Probably not.

There does appear to be some demand for tagging areas .. e.g. Area_sq_m 
(8,164), area:ha (4,109) and others. Unfortunately the tag 'area' is a 
simple indication of a shape being rendered .. and it would be confusing 
to use it as a numerical value. Possibly there needs to be some 
provision/instruction on the OSMwiki for this?
_
__Parishes .. admin boundaries etc..._
Not me! I have not dabbled in this, other than fixing some that were 
broken and I had easy access to the data (not UK ones). Think Alex has a 
diary entry on it with his thinking... might be a place to indicate a 
different interpretation compared to his thoughts (in a polite manner)?

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