[OSM-talk] National borders in the British Islands

[Andy Allan]

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 4:37 PM, elvin ibbotson
<elvin.ibbotson at poco.org.uk> wrote:
> I think most British mappers would be happier selecting
> from a boundary sub-menu of 'National', 'County', 'District', 'parish',

Yes.

> with
> each choice invisibly mapped back to the appropriate numerical boundary type
> than with the clumsy 'boundary=administrative' 'admin_level=4' approach.

No.

> In
> other countries/languages, other words would map to the same numbers.

Other words *could* be mapped into the same numbers. But since we can
see quite clearly that there are more than 10 types of administrative
boundaries in the world, and different people have different opinions
as to which are equivalent, what advantage is there in trying to
shoe-horn them into such a narrow set? And can anybody, in advance,
name every boundary type in the entire world and get the inter-nation
equivalence correct and uncontroversial? I think not.

I think we should store the actual boundary types, and if a user of
the data (e.g. a renderer) considers that English counties are
equivalent to US states then he can process them into both being the
same numerical value. If he considers English counties and US counties
to be equivalent, he can do so too. So the numerical equivalence table
should be on the rendering end of things, and the database should
store the actual factual data.

Or in short, call a spade a spade, not a gardening implement level 2.

Cheers,
Andy

> 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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