[OSM-talk] is_in

[Ben Laenen]

On Saturday 26 May 2007, David Earl wrote:
> Deprecate is_in and instead use things like:
>
> isin:city=Cambridge  // applied to suburbs, for example
> isin:district=South Cambridgeshire
> isin:county=Cambridgeshire
> isin:nation=England
> isin:country=Deutschland
> isin:state=Texas

I would really like to see something like that, right now I could tag 
some suburbs like

is_in:Antwerpen,Antwerpen,Antwerpen,Antwerpen,Flemish Region,Flemish 
Community,Belgium,Europe

(or the other way around, I don't remember)

where the first one would be a district (part of a municipality, has no 
exact representation in OSM yet) called Antwerp, in the city of 
Antwerp, in the district (collection of municipalities) called Antwerp, 
in the province called Antwerp.

Such an is_in tag for me is quite cumbersome and your proposed solution 
is much better, since it can make up the tree of all relationships 
nicely.

And with more isin tags for the same place one could also properly 
represent divisions that aren't completely in another bigger one (could 
give some nice Belgian examples of that...) or that belong to more 
divisions of the same kind (Brussels being part of both Flemish and 
French-speaking community for example)

And now for a harder trick: both Belgium and the Netherlands have a 
province called "Limburg", and they're adjacent. How would a 
municipality with isin:province=Limburg know the correct one? 


> Languages are solved too by using isin only in local language:
> München isin:state=Bavaria which in turn isin:country=Deutschland and
> then picking up foreign language forms from the referenced place as
> usual:

I'm not sure what would happen with places that have more official 
languages? Would any of them do?


> Finally capital cities might be better done as
> capital_city=yes

maybe enhance this key as well? Like:

capital_city:country=yes
capital_city:province=yes

Then we can have proper capitals for the smaller divisions as well. Or 
maybe even more enhanced like:

capital_off:community=Flemish Community
capital_off:community=French Community of Belgium

Brussels -- being part of both communities -- is also the capital of 
both ones... Now, there's no ambiguity here, but maybe there is one 
somewhere in this world...

I know, being able to represent Belgium the correct way is very hard, 
but if you can do it, you're sure you have found a good way to do 
it :-)

Greetings
Ben