[Talk-us] CDPs and admin_level

[David ``Smith'']

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:
> Should the various admin_level boundaries expect to be a hierarchy?  I
> would think that no city is split into two countries.  In the US where a
> what-people-think-of-as-city is split into two states, I think all cases
> hvae separate cities on the sides of the state line.
>
> Why is CDP different from UPS delivery zone, or zip code, or any other
> division by some other entity?
>
> Maybe CDP shouldn't be the same kind of political boundary tag and
> instead something else, like us_census_boundary and then be related to
> PMSA, SMSA, etc.

I won't dispute that line of thinking.  In that case, maybe we should
do something like

boundary=statistical,
statistical_unit=US:MSA|US:CSA|US:CDP|US:block_group|US:block|(others
for other countries)

and

boundary=postal, addr:postcode=*

and even, where we have the data,

boundary=lot or boundary=parcel or boundary=property

Regarding the first bit, I imagine some kind of standardization may
occur in the future to replace statistical_unit the way admin_level
replaced border_type.  Regarding the second bit, why isn't this done
already?  Still, I'm thinking both of these approaches merit creating
full-blown proposals on the Wiki.

There's a concern in my mind about what to do when a single way is
used as both an administrative and a statistical boundary, or some
other conflict with the boundary=* key.  My guess would be,
administrative trumps postal trumps statistical trumps lot.  Tagging
on multiple relations would make the data complete.

-- 
David "Smith"
a.k.a. Vid the Kid
a.k.a. Bír'd'in

Does this font make me look fat?