[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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