[Talk-us-massachusetts] Talk-us-massachusetts Digest, Vol 44, Issue 1

[Yury Yatsynovich]

Actually, Greg, the link that you provided, mentions the following:
"All boundaries that follow a water body or a ROW are coded in the
attribute table in the BND_QUAL field" and further on the same page there
is "BND_QUAL = 3 = boundary line follows a river or stream center". So, one
can use the layer TOWNSSERVEY_ARC of the "Community Boundaries (Towns) from
Survey Point" and values of its BND_QUAL field to see which sections of
towns' borders indeed go along the rivers

On Fri, May 29, 2020 at 10:45 AM Yury Yatsynovich <
yury.yatsynovich at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks, Greg!!
> I've also sent a brief email to MassGIS asking about possible sources that
> could be used to confirm parts of towns' boundaries aligned with rivers.
>
> On Fri, May 29, 2020 at 10:40 AM Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:
>
>> Yury Yatsynovich <yury.yatsynovich at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > Sorry, Greg, I could have explained in more clearly.
>> > Here is an example of a border between Newton and Watertown:
>> > The way (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/142866017) is the border
>> between
>> > Newton and Watertown and this way is, essentially, a duplicate of the
>> > Charles River stream. Wikipedia says "From Watertown to Waltham to
>> Needham
>> > and Dedham <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedham,_Massachusetts>,
>> Newton is
>> > bounded by the Charles River <
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_River>."
>>
>> wikipedia is not authoritative.   town boundaries are as I understand it
>> defined by statute.
>>
>> > (this is also confirmed by town's GIS maps, but it would be great if
>> anyone
>> > could direct me to a formal document that says something like "the
>> border
>> > between Newton and Watertown goes along the middle of the Charles
>> River")
>> > -- so, almost certainly, the river itself is the border and if its
>> stream
>> > changes so does the border. Thus, I suggest excluding the way (
>> > https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/142866017) from the border relations
>> for
>> > Newton and Watertown and including the corresponding part of the Charles
>> > River instead. This will help to solve, besides removing duplicate ways,
>> > the above mentioned problem of when the stream changes, so should the
>> > border as well.
>>
>> I think this needs research into authoriative evidence before doing it.
>> Absent that, I think our borders should follow the "towns survey" point
>> layer from massgis.
>>
>>
>> https://docs.digital.mass.gov/dataset/massgis-data-community-boundaries-towns-survey-points
>>
>> This layer talks about being derived from statute and also gives
>> references to  atlases of boundaries.
>>
>> One of my friends is knowledgeable about this sort of thing and I will
>> ask about this border and statute.
>>
>>
>
> --
> Yury Yatsynovich
>


-- 
Yury Yatsynovich
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