[Talk-GB] Traditional Counties and Vice Counties

Mark Goodge mark at good-stuff.co.uk
Fri Jan 8 09:00:18 UTC 2021



On 07/01/2021 23:14, Andy Townsend wrote:
> I'm just writing this just as a "for info" in case anyone is interested, 
> not as a "someone must fix this now!" kind of thing.
> 
> I recently noticed a few problems with National Parks and AONBs in the 
> UK and patched them up (see 
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse/diary/395232 ).  It then 
> occurred to me that there may be similar issues with other 
> less-often-visualised areas like traditional and ceremonial counties, so 
> I used the same method as in that diary entry to check those.  The same 
> ceremonial counties are found both via Overpass and as polygons in a 
> rendering database, so there are no problems there.  Traditional 
> counties were a different issue though - I had to patch up a couple of 
> minor problems, but the following issues remain:
To be honest, I don't think that the traditional counties belong in OSM 
anyway, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, they break the principle that we map what is, not what was. 
Traditional county boundaries have no functional administrative value 
now, and are irrelevant to anyone who isn't engaged in any kind of 
historical research. If people want to use OSM for displaying 
traditional counties then a better way is to use OSM as a base map and 
then overlay it with a KML layer or GeoJSON layer showing the 
traditional boundaries. Or even, as the Association of British Counties 
has done, create their own tiles with the traditional boundaries 
superimposed. But not put the data into OSM itself.

Secondly, there's no such thing as "the" traditional county boundaries 
anyway. They were fluid, and subject to change. The Victorians, in 
particular, were inveterate tinkerers with local government and were 
forever tweaking the boundaries, a little here and a little there. So 
any traditional county boundary data can only ever be a snapshot of what 
the boundaries were at any particular point in time. And there's no 
consensus about which is the most "correct" snapshot to use. Even the 
Historic Counties Trust, which aims to promote awareness of the 
traditional counties, offers boundary data in different definitions. We 
can't possibly include all of them in OSM, but picking just one of them 
means making an editorial view as to the most appropriate snapshot. In 
the absence of an agreed traditional county standard for OSM, leaving it 
up to individual mappers will inevitably result in inconsistencies.

(For avoidance of doubt, I agree that the Ceremonial Counties - which 
are closely based on the Traditional counties - do belong in OSM, as 
they have a current function. But for those, we can use the official 
boundary data, along with all other current administrative areas).

Mark



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