[OSM-talk] National borders in the British Islands

[Martijn van Oosterhout]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 10:17 PM, Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> wrote:
> I'm not bothered that these levels are numbers, it is just that the CURRENT
> numbers do not allow for ALL of the levels as THIS list suggests.
>
> I still think there is a place for continents here rather than having to
> create yet another set of numbers? Africa, Asia and the rest are USED to
> provide administrative type grouping just as African Union and Asian Union do.

Problem is that they violate the nesting rule: countries can span
multiple continents. Similarly continents are defined strictly by
geographical features (where the land meets the sea) whereas country
borders reach a distance into the sea, so they violate the covering
idea also.

I don't have any good ideas about how to do continents (and by
extension the large oceans like Atlantic/Pacific/Indian/Southern/etc),
but I don't think admin_level is the right place. I don't think a
single country border runs along a continent border so you're not even
saving space.

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