[Talk-us] Boundaries and verifiability (was Re: Retagging hamlets in the US)

[Bryce Nesbitt]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 2:00 AM, Minh Nguyen <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us>
wrote:

> I've taken quite a few imported municipal boundaries, lined them up with
> road easements or hedges between farms _when that is obviously the intent_,
> and deleted extra nodes. These borders become far more accurate and precise
> in OSM than in commercial maps, which regurgitate TIGER boundaries verbatim.
>
> The most authoritative source for most U.S. land borders, going all the
> way down to the parcel level, is a legal prose definition in conjunction
> with any number of monuments on the ground.


Ah, another sticky wicket.

There are many defacto boundaries created by roads, hedges, powerlines,
ridges or bodies of water.

I argue the most appropriate boundary in OSM is indeed the defacto
boundary.  If people are using, paving, weeding
and farming the boundary, that's the one we can map.

The legal boundary is not something OSM can adjudicate.  Finding that
boundary is a complex process involving survey points, land descriptions,
and often handwritten records stored in dark basements.  It also hardy ever
matters, at least to a mapper or map reader.

----

Note that in the USA boundaries are determined by reference to written
deeds, and subject to challenge in court.  Various non-registered rights,
including right of passage, may exist.  It's a huge mess.

In Australia, as I understand, land ownership is a matter of public record,
and all ownership changes must be registered. The government records are,
by definition, correct.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20150325/e61f7570/attachment.html>