[Talk-us] CDP tagging

[Minh Nguyen]

On 2015-01-08 18:43, James Mast wrote:
> A user today just happened to change the 'Carnot-Moon' [1] ways [2] and
> relation boundary [3] from a 'boundary=administrative' 'admin_level=8'
> to 'boundary=census'.  Is this the correct way we have been tagging
> stuff like this?  I've pretty much stayed away from these types of edits
> (unless it's something obvious that needs to be reverted), and was just
> curious to what the rest of the US was doing before I either reverted
> the changesets this was done in, or contact the user (or if somebody who
> has more 'knowledge' on these types of edits wants to contact him
> instead, be my guest).
>
> -James
>
> [1] -
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Carnot-Moon,%20Pennsylvania?uselang=en-US
> [2] - https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/38518599
> [3] - https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/189136

Taginfo currently shows over 2,000 instances of boundary=census, both 
for CDPs and for statistical boundaries in other countries. [1]

I use boundary=census. If it weren't already in such wide use, I 
would've gone with the more generic-sounding boundary=statistical, but 
whatever. Another mapper in Ohio prefers to delete the boundary and 
admin_level tags but leave place=locality in place. [2] IMO the 
important thing is to remove the misleading administrative tags.

The TIGERcnl import apparently only brought in CDPs, but the Census 
defines a whole hierarchy of areas, including metropolitan statistical 
areas (MSAs), census county divisions (CCDs), and census tracts. [3] If 
we ever attempted to map them, boundary=census and boundary=statistical 
would be equally ambiguous and a tag similar to admin_level would be 
required. However, there doesn't seem to have been much demand for 
including these other Census features in OSM. (For that matter, if 
TIGERcnl had left out CDPs, I would've preferred to seem them mapped as 
POIs at centroids rather than as areas. Even where the CDP name is 
widely used, the boundary is less clear-cut than a city limit.)

[1] http://taginfo.osm.org/tags/boundary=census
[2] http://wiki.osm.org/wiki/Ohio/Boundaries/CDPs
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:USCensus_Geography

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us