[Talk-us] Admin borders in the US

Richard Welty rwelty at averillpark.net
Sun Nov 3 17:55:38 UTC 2013


On 11/3/13 12:17 PM, Martijn van Exel wrote:
> Administrative boundaries are generally not verifiable by ground
> surveying, and are not straightforward to edit. This causes
> information rot. What good is administrative boundary information that
> are not trustworthy? Moreover, they are freely[1] and easily available
> from an authoritative source. For all these reasons combined, I would
> favor them not being in OSM at all.
>
on the other hand, people expect to see at least some of these
boundaries in a map, and apps like Nominatum and various
GPS apps (OsmAnd being one) use them.

i understand your point of view, but removing them will be
very disruptive to a bunch of important data consumers.

what i favor is going to a multi layer approach where some
layers of OSM are ground verifiable things and others may
not be. a consumer could choose to use some layers, and
the admin boundaries (which are a real problem) can be
moved and we can consider how to approach them differently
because what we're doing now isn't working real well.

richard




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