[Talk-us] An admin_level for CDPs?

[Minh Nguyen]

On 2013-01-01 2:18 PM, stevea wrote:
>> On 12/31/12 5:12 PM, Minh Nguyen wrote:
>>> I'd argue that not all governmental boundaries need to be tagged as
>>> boundary=administrative. In Ohio, we've started to retag CDP
>>> boundaries with boundary=census and place=locality but without
>>> admin_level. [1][2] They still show up in Nominatim as localities.
>> this is approximately what i was thinking should be done with CDPs.
>
> This sounds workable to me, as well.  It is agreeable that CDPs not have
> an assigned admin_level, I was opening this for discussion to see if
> there might be wider consensus.  CDPs *are* created by the Bureau of the
> Census, but the *SAs are not, they are created by the Office of
> Management and Budget (OMB).

Ah, my mistake. I'm not fundamentally opposed to putting in statistical 
areas; I just think it may be less confusing to use some other value of 
boundary=* (even with admin_level set), rather than overloading 
boundary=administrative for what evidently isn't a straightforward 
hierarchy of government entities. It's specialized information, less 
important than your typical city/county distinctions when completing the 
sentence "This business is located in..."

> It *does* beg the question of what *should* be tagged as
> boundary=administrative *and* have an admin_level tag.  For example, my
> local University of California campus has a polygon tagged
> boundary=administrative, border_type=university (and amenity=university
> + name=*).  Might/should it also be tagged admin_level=4?  Even though
> it partially overlaps (and largely is in) City Limits, it *is* an
> administrative unit of state government (neither city/local nor county)
> with its own police, fire and health-care infrastructure, its own
> planning and development functions and a recent lawsuit (since
> dismissed) between it and its "host" city, proving it and the city are
> different entities.

I never really saw the need to tag state college campuses as 
boundary=administrative, just amenity=university, but some of the UCs do 
operate like cities unto themselves. The UC extension in Cincinnati ;-) 
has a neighborhood council that almost corresponds to the campus 
boundaries, so I mapped the neighborhood separately with admin_level=10.

However, I don't think it always makes sense to tag public property as 
boundary=administrative based solely on who owns the land.

In Ohio [1], a city can own property outside its limits: the City of 
Cincinnati recently sold a general aviation airport back to the suburb 
it's in, but it wouldn't've made sense to tag the airport as an exclave 
of Cincinnati. State law prohibits municipal exclaves, and it isn't as 
if any "Welcome to Cincinnati" signs were posted there. Also, a city or 
village can annex public property (such as a county park or public 
university) without the government agency's consent. [2] People describe 
public lands as being inside townships or municipalities, not as 
enclaves of them.

> The same question (admin_level=4) might also be asked about California
> State Park boundaries...but they are *already* tagged with
> admin_level=4, so at least there is precedent (thanks, Apo42) for
> state-level "units" with specific administrative boundaries to be tagged
> with admin_level.  I'd like that to become widespread among all 50
> states, which also implies national parks get tagged with
> admin_level=2.  State/national parks and state universities really do
> have their own administrations, and this implies an admin_level tag.

I think you meant that national parks would get admin_level=4 and state 
parks admin_level=6. Otherwise, you'd make national parks into nations.

I've only mapped a couple of state parks, but here I'm also of the 
opinion that parks should get something other than 
boundary=administrative. Following examples in California, I've been 
overloading admin_level to indicate the admin_level of the operator (=2 
for national, =4 for state, =6 for county). But if you combine 
admin_level=4 with boundary=administrative for national parks and so on, 
then national parks would conceptually be peers with states and state 
parks peers with counties. They may be subordinate to the same 
authority, but they aren't peers.

So instead I've been misusing boundary=national_park, combining it with 
admin_level=4 for state parks. It stinks, but boundary=protected_area 
looks like a good way out of this mess. [3][4]

> What I found useful to do around here (where there are CDP polygons
> entered from TIGER, but they have no admin_level tag) is to add a point
> tagged hamlet=* or village=* or town=* (but not necessarily suburb=* as
> that implies city subordination, nor city=* as that implies
> incorporation) to the "approximate center point" of the CDP polygon,
> along with a name=* tag that matches the name of the CDP. This point
> might logically be a mathematical centroid, but I have found it more
> useful to place this point at a more culturally significant point in the
> "human center" of the community designated by the CDP.  Usually this is
> at or near a significant crossroads, where there might be a market, a
> church, a school, a small commercial district, or the like.

Yes, this makes a lot of sense. TIGER 2008 came with place=hamlets for 
all the 2010 CDPs in the Cincinnati area, all in very sensible 
locations, so I just assumed the CDPs were a subset of all the 
unincorporated areas in TIGER.

[1] Sorry to keep trotting out Ohio. It's like a whole 'nuther country 
out there.
[2] 
http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20120609/NEWS0108/306090045/More-border-battles-communities-search-cash-
[3] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dprotected_area
[4] https://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/4249

-- 
Minh Nguyen <mxn at 1ec5.org>
Jabber: mxn at 1ec5.org; Blog: http://notes.1ec5.org/