[OSM-talk] Part-municipalities and more place issues

[Ben Laenen]

Hi all,

We're trying to find some way to tag some oddities for places in 
Belgium, so I hope if some of you could give some insight in how best 
to tag these.

Some little history: In the 1960's till the 1980's a lot of 
municipalities merged with other municipalities. Many were subsumed 
into other ones, or sometimes two of about the same size were combined 
into one. This meant that over 2500 municipalities became less than 
600, but those municipalities didn't just disappear: they formed a new 
subdivision.

The effect of this was that there were two new terms for administrative 
divisions: "deelgemeente" (could be translated as "part-municipality") 
and "district" (this is actually the same, but only the 
part-municipalities of Antwerp are called district, just to say that we 
don't need specific tags for just the districts).

So it's actually quite easy: we have municipalities which exist out of 
different part-municipalities. But we can't tag those properly now. 
Some problems we have:

* There are municipalities with names 
like "Houthalen-Helchteren", "Knokke-Heist", etc. As you might have 
guessed: these are each actually two bigger "towns" which form one 
municipality. One town is called e.g. Houthalen, the other one 
Helchteren. Sometimes you see that depicted on maps like "Houthalen-" 
on one part, and "Helchteren" on the other one, like:
  Houthalen-

         Helchteren

* We have no way to properly tag part-municipalities or districts, yet 
we all use the name of those part-municipalities when we need to go 
there. Reserving a tag like "suburb" is quite undoable: the population 
of these part-municipalities and districts varies from a few dozen to 
over 70.000. The latter one should really display much more prominently 
than the former on the map. The latter one also should display more 
prominently than another municipality with 5.000 inhabitants.

* To be quite blunt: I don't like the usage of the city/town/... tags: 
I'd like it much more that there are general tags like "municipality" 
(and in our case also something like "part-municipality"), and use an 
extra "population" tag to know how big to render the name. In 
Belgium "city" is a title given to a municipality (I think the UK has 
the same system), and if we tagged every city as such over a fifth of 
all municipalities would be a city (133 of 589), which would make the 
map of Belgium quite interesting...

So, my suggestion: I'd like to see a new key "municipality" being used 
from now on, and useage of the "population" key (Wikipedia has a lot of 
info on that). But if someone decides now that cities of 1 million 
people should show more prominent on the map, he at least can do that 
somehow (but all the ones with population over 100.000 now get the same 
city tag). But that way we can introduce other tags 
like "part-municipality" (and what other things might exist on this 
planet?), which don't need seperate rules to display them on the map.

The way I'm personally tagging things in Belgium now is: discard all 
info about municipalities/districts, and use for example "town" for a 
district of 70.000 inhabitants. Surely that's a nice way to get it 
rendered nicely, but you'd lose the data that one belongs to the other 
one. is_in wouldn't do its job to fix that: is_in=Antwerpen could mean 
anything from province, arrondissement (group of municipalities, we 
need a tag once for that too maybe, but that's not urgent, we don't 
really use that one :-) ), municipality and district...

Anyway, I still need to find a nice way to render the 
Houthalen-Helchteren case, so it's not like:
   Houthalen
  Houthalen-Helchteren
           Helchteren
on the map. The only way I can see it work like above is 
a "display_like" tag, which incidentally would be quite useful for 
bilingual municipalities/streets/etc in e.g. 
Brussels: "name:fr=Bruxelles", "name:nl=Brussel", "display_as=Bruxelles - 
Brussel". I got the idea once to make use of the ";" delimiter for 
different tags, so we get "name=Brussel;Bruxelles", but that doesn't 
render like I'd like (one name on a different line for example, or for 
streets divided by a "-")...
But I'm diverging now too much, the issue was about 
part-municipalities :-)

So, any ideas?

Greetings
Ben