[OSM-talk] National borders in the British Islands

[Lester Caine]

Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> 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.

Same applies to any of the country boundaries, do you draw high water line, or 
the international demarcation out on the continental shelf.
And England and Ireland are part of Europe and the EU so do you include the 
water around them or not.

The 'nesting' rule does not exist. We have already had enough examples of 
where boundaries form different 'sets' of areas so there is no way to insist 
that the 'admin' boundaries are mutually exclusive :(

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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