[OSM-np] [Tagging] How to determine the value for admin_level?

[Prabhas Pokharel]

cc-ing talk-np, to include a broader Nepal community.

I wanted to add a couple of things:
- These boundaries are all created as administrative entities; not
legislative power exists for them at the moment.

- The zone used to be quite important, with an Zonal President
(Anchaladhish) present at each zone, but their importance has declined.
However, the concept of the zone _is_ used by certain government functions.
For example, the first things in vehicle license plates is the zone (ex. a
plat may be BA 1 PA, the BA refers to Bagmati zone).

- The district is really the most important admin level. I would even say
that in present day Nepal, they are closest to a "state" (which we don't
really have). In general, for most ministries, reporting happens from the
ward level, goes up to the VDC level, sometimes goes up to an "Ilaka" level
(which seems to be defined in different way by different users of this
term), then to district level, and then straight up to the national level.

- The zone, and even more importantly the development zone (of which there
were only 5), despite not having administrative / legislative importance
now, are a useful concept for talking about various parts of the country.
So these are important "reference" admin boundaries (and any location in
the country does fall into one and only one zone / development zone) for
people's understanding of location. For example, I, a Nepali citizen, may
not know where "Argakhanchi" district is, but I am very likely to know
where Lumbini zone is, and almost certainly know where the Western
Development Zone / Development Region is.

- VDCs are sub-sectioned into wards. I am not confident that the country is
perfectly subdivided into regions that are either a municipality of a VDC,
but this is the impression I get as well.


On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 5:57 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer
<dieterdreist at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
>
> 2013/9/1 Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com>
>
>> As Frederik points out, admin_level=8 is typically used for "town",
>> "city", or "municipality".  To the extent that (some) administrative
>> divisions in Nepal are functionally similar to administrative divisions
>> in other countries, using the same admin_level numbers is helpful
>> because in theory osm is a country-agnostic database, and then a query
>> on level=4 would get semantically consistent results.
>>
>> It would help to hear a bit more about how these levels function.
>
>
>
> +1, usually administrative entities should have some sort of governmental
> entity at this level (e.g. a president, a governor, a mayor or some similar
> function), if this isn't the case most probably it is not an administrative
> subdivision. Another question might be (similar): "at which levels is there
> legislation?" Then you can look at what part of legislation has certain
> competences and how independent are they, in order to determine whether
> something is level 3 or 4 or 5 or 6, ...
>
>
>
>> So I think zones should get admin_level=4.  Development regions should
>> then be admin_level=3.
>>
> How long have zones existed?  Development regions?  If the zone concept
>> is 150 years old and the development region 25, that's a huge clue that
>> zones are the real subdivision.
>
>
>
> -1, it doesn't matter how old they are, the only important thing is how
> things are organized now, not how long they have been organized in this way.
>
> This page suggests that the 5 development regions are the main subdivision
> and that zones ceased to exist in 2002 (disused since 1995):
> http://www.statoids.com/unp.html
> According to this the next step would be the districts, but other sources
> suggest that these development zones haven't been of administrative
> significance for the country so far and that zones are what really is the
> actual top level administrative subdivision.
> It is you, resident in the country and able to read the laws and
> publications in the local language, that has the best possibilities to put
> these administrative levels "right". Like Frederik pointed out, if you can
> find references to LAU or NUTS levels you could take the shortcut and most
> easily determine which levels fit best.
>
> cheers,
> Martin
>
>
>


-- 
Prabhas Pokharel
http://prabhasp.com
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