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

[Mario Salvini]

"boundary=administrative" with a well chosen "admin_level=..." should be 
the answer.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Talk:Key:boundary
maybe you need a admin_level=12 for the part-municipals

regards
 mario

Ben Laenen schrieb:
> 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
>
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