[OSM-talk-ie] Tagging the Ireland/Northern Ireland border

[Paul Oldham]

Hi folks

We at The Hug are coming to the end of rendering a set of tiles for 
Ireland and we came across an odd issue when rendering the border. We 
tried to use boundary=administrative plus admin_level=2 as per the 
wiki[1][2] but when we rendered using that combination we realized that 
there was a problem in that about 75% was so tagged and the rest wasn't.

Some sections were missing both tags, some were missing one.

So I worked my way through all along the border to ensure the entire 
border had boundary=administrative plus admin_level=2 so it was both 
consistent and tied up with the tagging mandated by the wiki. That both 
helped us and, I thought, was making the OSM data more consistent.

I also found that the much of border had a tag boundary_type=nation. We 
weren't clear where that came from as it's not mentioned in the wiki but 
we were faced with either taking it out of lots of sections or adding it 
to less. Preferring to be constructive rather than destructive we opted 
for the latter.

I've since had a comment from user SK53 saying that "We're a bit puzzled 
by these edits"[3] (I'm not sure who "we" is in this context?) and they 
said:

> At the very least you need to discuss this with the Irish OSM community
> at the talk-ie mailing list.

So here I am. I think my questions are:

1. Are you happy with what I've done?

2. If not then can you explain why some of the border was not
   previously tagged boundary=administrative plus admin_level=2 so that
   I'm clear why it was done that way?

3. Does anyone know what the story is behind the boundary_type=nation
   tagging?

-- 
Paul

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:boundary

[2] 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dadministrative#admin_level

[3] http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/47540796