[Talk-us] National Park boundaries

[Martijn van Exel]

Hi,

On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 6:07 PM, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:
>
>   a search for 'Golden Spike' yields nada. I was about to draw a
>   boundary=national_park[3] around it with a name tag, so it would be a
>   little easier to find. But it turns out the NPS has a boundary
>   shapefile for all National Parks, Historic Sites, Rivers, Parkways,
>   Lakeshores and more than a dozen other categories[4].
>
> I wouldn't object to importing park boundaries.
>
> But, I find boundary=national_park odd, relative to the rest of
> boundary=*.  For truly large parks, it makes some sense.
> A related issue is tagging the polygon rather than the boundary, and the
> landuse=conservation/leisure=recreatation_ground tagging (not really
> right for parks, but actually the combination describes the NPS
> mission).
>
> So I have a mild preference (not backed up by volunteering) to make the
> park boundary/polygon tagging a bit more baked before importing.
>

Boundary is used on ways and relations (and even on nodes..). I don't
have a problem with using boundary ways if the boundaries are a set of
disjoint, simple polygons like in this case. It's a shame that they
are not rendered in default mapnik but that argument can't prevail
over logical classification arguments.

Maybe we should just introduce a new set of boundary= tags for the
various NPS domains:

boundary=national_historic_site
boundary=national_historic_park
boundary=national_forest[1]
....

There are 37 classes in total, most of them with only a few instances.

What do y'all think of that idea?

[1] Already in use, oddly 182 out of 183 uses are nodes, seems like an
unfinished or ill-advised edit session:
http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/boundary=national_forest#overview

-- 
martijn van exel
http://oegeo.wordpress.com