[Talk-us] US-Mexico border precision

[Val Kartchner]

On Thu, 2010-12-16 at 21:39 -0600, Paul Johnson wrote:
> On 12/16/2010 08:59 AM, Alan Mintz wrote:
> > At 2010-12-14 17:52, Nathan Edgars II wrote:
> >> ... One likely error is at
> >> http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=25.93454,-97.56975&z=15&t=T where TIGER
> >> follows the existing import rather than the Rio Grande (Google seems
> >> to have used the same import and has the same probable error), so I'll
> >> add a FIXME tag to that section.
> > 
> > Do recall that bad Google border data (as supplied by the US State
> > Department, IIRC), was responsible for brief hostilities in Central
> > America recently.
> > 
> > If someone has edited our international (or state, for that matter)
> > borders, I'd want to ask them about their source. Country and state
> > borders are pretty carefully defined by law and treaties, and it's
> > unlikely that an individual user is more correct than a current
> > government-sourced dataset.
> 
> You'd think, but then you have Needles, Arizona, which California keeps
> trying to claim.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=40.73641&lon=-114.0402&zoom=17&layers=M is a link to a location where the "government-sourced dataset" is off by varying amounts.  Since the casinos are literally just across the state line (I've been there, but not in the buildings), I can tell that the state lines are pretty close to correct.  However, look at the lower-level administrative boundaries.  The Tooele County line is especially far off.  I'm sure that there are many more errors in the database as well.  Any automated way we can take care of this too?

- Val -