[OSM-talk] National borders in the British Islands

Martijn van Oosterhout kleptog at gmail.com
Sat May 31 10:42:22 BST 2008


On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 11:20 PM, Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.

For country boundaries we draw them where they are. No country's
border is at the high water mark. Consider this image:
http://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/geotool/
I don't know where the continental shelf is, but I bet it isn't along
any of those borders.

Something like the EU is merely the union of the countries within it.
There are bits of the EU scattered across the globe., I would rather
model that as a relation. Some 60% of the earths surface is
"international waters" and belongs to no-one. Most of the time the EEZ
is relevent because the continetal shelf varies dramatically in width.

> 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 :(

Do you have an example if such a jurisdictional anomoly? It would seem
to me that such a "servant with two masters" would have some rather
interesting problems.

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




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