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

[Minh Nguyen]

On 2015-03-25 09:54, Bryce Nesbitt wrote:
> 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.

That may be true when it comes to private property, but the de jure 
boundary of a given village, county, etc. matters to many members of the 
general public, all of whom could wind up reading our map. To the extent 
that a given place has a de facto boundary -- which I take to mean a 
boundary not *administered* by a government -- we shouldn't map it as an 
*administrative* boundary, and we should avoid mapping overly subjective 
data in fine detail anyways.

I would imagine that administrative boundaries like city limits are a 
matter of public record. Granted, the public record isn't necessarily 
free or online, and the city may well store it in a dark basement. But 
where we can ascertain the legal definition of a city limit while 
respecting our copyright policies, we provide a valuable service by 
turning that prose into free geodata correlated with other features like 
roads. TIGER gets us most of the way there for city limits but not for a 
major city's political subdivisions.

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us