[talk-pr] Issues with Nominatim API services and administrative boundaries in Puerto Rico

[Jose Cuevas]

Hi

1. Recently I noticed that reverse geolocation APIs using nominatim return the wrong City. This is true for nominatim services from openstreetmap, mapquest and mapbox. Im pretty sure is the same for others but I only checked these three.

2. As documented in the wiki United States admin level (found in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_admin_level) the current boundaries in the map are correct for PR.

2. Nevertheless the stark contrast in the use of values for administrative boundaries in Puerto Rico compare to the states hampers all the basic assumptions made by mapping services when using reverse address lookups, in the current state makes them pretty much useless and that puts Puerto Rico in a disadvantage.

3. While making a feature for nominatim is an option, most mapping services used in mobile and websites use their on versions of nominatim or the proprietary services which will make getting a solution out very hard.

4. It seems proper that we should re-evaluate the values use for administrative boundaries given:

4.1. that it will be hard to get vendors to accommodate our values when pretty much every state follows an standard,

4.2. values used in other jurisdictions in the state should accommodate our local particularities, in fact must legal processes do refer to "barrios" as wards.

4.3. we should think of "county" as a possible administrative option for Puerto Rico.

5. To make these services work we would only have to move barrios to administrative boundaries level "9" (currently not used in PR) and move municipios fro its current value of "6" to "7".



Jose L Cuevas
Office of the CIO 
University of Puerto Rico
t: 787-832-4040 EXT 2055
e: jose.cuevas at upr.edu
w: https://portal.upr.edu
s: https://twitter.com/uprnext