[OSM-talk] National borders in the British Islands

elvin ibbotson elvin.ibbotson at poco.org.uk
Thu May 29 16:37:09 BST 2008


This discussion about the national status of England, Scotland, Wales  
and Ulster is very entertaining but is not going to reach a  
conclusion without another war. Personally I would give these  
countries the same status as states as they are effectively states  
within the United Kingdom or (with the exception of Ulster) Great  
Britain.

This strand of the discussion (below) though echoes the earlier  
thread I kicked off (but gave up pursuing because there seemed to be  
more prejudice than logic in the discussion) about the idea of  
numerically-based properties in the database mapped to human-friendly  
language in editors and viewers. Most of that discussion was about  
highways but similar arguments seem to apply to boundaries. I think  
most British mappers would be happier selecting from a boundary sub- 
menu of 'National', 'County', 'District', 'parish', with each choice  
invisibly mapped back to the appropriate numerical boundary type than  
with the clumsy 'boundary=administrative' 'admin_level=4' approach.  
In other countries/languages, other words would map to the same numbers.

But isn't this democratic/anarchic approach to mapping great? I'm  
going to put a national/state level boundary around our village and  
name it Isle of Man, resulting in some worthwhile reductions in taxes  
and a free grandstand seat for the TT races next month :-)

elvin ibbotson


From: Shaun McDonald <shaun at shaunmcdonald.me.uk>
Date: 29 May 2008 13:43:43 BDT
To: Bruce Cowan <lists at bcowan.fastmail.co.uk>
Cc: talk at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] National borders in the British Islands

On 29 May 2008, at 13:31, Bruce Cowan wrote:

> Seriously, the number system for borders is rather strange, surely  
> there
> must be a more obvious scale. I suppose this has been mentioned before
> though.
>

I thought people are using things like district, country, city, town  
etc for the boundaries, rather than a numeric value.


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