[Talk-GB] Traditional/Historic Counties

[Adam Snape]

Hi Paul,

Thanks, that's a good point. I wasn't planning on adding subdivisions such
as the Ridings (it opens the floodgates for the Sussex Rapes and the
Hundreds of other counties and I'm not sure how relevant they are to people
in the modern day). So, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, Yorkshire wouldn't be
problematic. Derbyshire, obviously would be.

Does Nominatim normally utilise relations with the boundary=historic
tag when deciding where a place node is situated? If so, I agree that's a
problem (and arguably a bug). It would be nice if somebody could search
for, say, Middlesex or Yorkshire and have the historic boundary pop up as a
result. Ideally it would also be able to recognise a search for something
like Bolton, Lancashire, but displaying the historic county in all searches
would be wrong.

Is anybody familiar with how Nominatim treats historic boundary relations?

Adam

On 13 February 2017 at 12:52, Paul Berry <pmberry2007 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Any thoughts?
>
> If there is a way of tagging these so they're ignored by Nominatim etc so
> address/location searches only show up modern counties, unless specifically
> searched for, and no occlusion occurs, then yes. Otherwise, you might get
> the following results:
>
> Sheffield
> South Yorkshire
> West Riding of Yorkshire
>
> or, the even worse (depending on your loyalties):
>
> Sheffield
> South Yorkshire
> Derbyshire
>
> etc
>
> I'd very much guard against that.
>
> Regards,
> *Paul*
>
>
> On 13 February 2017 at 12:23, Adam Snape <adam.c.snape at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thinking about points raised by a couple of respondents. Firstly, the
>> thorny issue of whether to record features which no longer exist;
>> secondly, whether it is actually possible to give precise boundaries to
>> historic/traditional counties and, thirdly, the source(s) which could be
>> used for information.
>>
>> 1. Whilst the administrative counties based upon the historic counties
>> have been abolished or changed significantly in recent decades, successive
>> governments have stated that the traditional counties have never been
>> abolished and continue to exist along their ancient boundaries. Most
>> recently: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/eric-pickles-celebrate-st
>> -george-and-englands-traditional-counties
>>
>> 2. The counties existed centuries before detailed maps and thus their
>> boundaries are usually defined by geographic features such as rivers,
>> hilltops, watersheds. The boundaries were very stable, with the only even
>> vaguely significant changes being the 19th century efforts to remove
>> detached parts of counties (sometimes for reasons lost in time a parish
>> might notionally belong to another county). When the administrative county
>> councils were created their areas sometimes differed slightly from the
>> traditional county where it would cause administrative problems (usually
>> where the county boundary bisected a major settlement).
>>
>> 3. Luckily the Historic Counties Trust has detailed a sensible standard
>> definition of the historic counties and mapped their boundaries. These have
>> been released for reuse as shape files: http://www.county-borders.co.uk/
>> . I propose making use of the 'A Standard' shape files (the traditional
>> county boundaries ignoring detached parts) which should be ideal for our
>> purposes.
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>>
>> Adam
>>
>>
>> On 10 February 2017 at 15:03, Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> On 09/02/17 23:40, Adam Snape wrote:
>>> > My view was that - like teh Irish Townlands project - there's still
>>> > a cultural relevance to these historical units and I thought it a good
>>> > potential use of boundary=historical, but if the consensus is that it's
>>> > not a good idea then that's fine.
>>>
>>> Anomalies such as 'Middlesex' sort of challenge any rule especially when
>>> there is no 'real' boundary to map at all. But the ability to access
>>> historic material, the vast majority of which is still current remains a
>>> sticking point. end_date is still the right way of handling the changes
>>> that are due with the NEXT round of boundary changes, so including
>>> previous historic changes in that data still makes sense while there is
>>> no reliable way of archive the data to another database ...
>>>
>>> --
>>> Lester Caine - G8HFL
>>> -----------------------------
>>> Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
>>> L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
>>> EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
>>> Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
>>> Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Talk-GB mailing list
>> Talk-GB at openstreetmap.org
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/attachments/20170213/18f4a2b8/attachment-0001.html>