[OSM-talk] Populated places: how to use is_in tag?

graham graham at theseamans.net
Mon Oct 8 13:46:54 BST 2007


Abigail Brady wrote:
> On 10/8/07, *graham* <graham at theseamans.net 
> <mailto:graham at theseamans.net>> wrote:
> 
>      From my limited experience with it so far it works ok with osm data
>     with the exception of London: 'LondonBorough' is fine, but there's
>     nothing beneath it. Although parishes were abolished
>     administratively in
>     the 60s, people use that level quite as much as the borough level in
>     everyday life (for my area Heston, Isleworth, Cranford etc, as subparts
>     of the borough, Hounslow). So you end up with one set of tags heavily
>     used on osm but with no administrative category (to my knowledge - does
>     anyone know better?)
> 
> 
> One should be careful to not confuse informal locality names, with 
> parishes and other formal hierarchy.
> Informal locality names are great, and we should have them, but it would 
> be a mistake to assume they can be added to a hierachial structure: many 
> informal districts cross formal boundaries, for one thing.

So how would you see the formal administrative names being used on osm? 
Not at all, and we just have the informal ones (which may in general 
happen to coincide with the administrative ones)? Or we have two 
separate sets of tags? I see people have recently begun to add 
administrative boundaries to the map, so it's not a problem that can be 
permanently evaded.

> 
> (Urban parishes, in Greater London and and the rest of the country, were 
> moribund well before 1965, with a 1:1 mapping of parish to borough
> anyway.  As an example, the parish of Cranford was abolished in 1935, 
> going to form part of the parish of "Heston and Isleworth", which was 
> contigous with the urban district of the same).
> 

So do these historical names - which are still very used locally - map 
to any modern formal system (electoral, health-care, educational...) or 
are they purely kept alive by local custom?

Graham

> -- 
> Abi





More information about the talk mailing list