[OSM-talk] National borders in the British Islands

[Martijn van Oosterhout]

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 11:52 PM, Cartinus <cartinus at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> For another less obvious example closer to Martijn van Oosterhout:
> A Dutch "waterschap" is an administrative level that resorts directly below
> the national government. Several of them straddle provincial boundaries. In
> the Netherlands this problem is solved on most maps by just ignoring
> the "waterschap" boundaries, because most people ignore the "waterschappen"
> anyway. There is however no reason not to put them in the openstreetmap
> database (if we can get the data).

Most people ignore them because they are irrevelent to most people.
They make no laws, have no jurisdiction. In that sense they're more
like postcode boundaries: a fairly arbitrary division of area for the
purposes of optimising some process. Another example would be the area
covered by a power substation or gas distribution node. These are
well-defined areas, but not interesting to people directly.

That isn't to say these boundaries shouldn't be in OSM. It would be
interesting to have the local zones associated with schools in AU, for
example. I'm just not sure admin_level is the right tag for this.

But then, I don't have any other suggestion for tags either. I was
kinda assuming that admin_level would only be for legal administrative
boundaries, not so much any arbitrary boundary.

Have a nice day,
-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog at gmail.com> http://svana.org/kleptog/