[OSM-talk] England, Wales, Scotland borders

[Peter Miller]

On 4 Oct 2009, at 08:12, Igor Brejc wrote:

> Hi,
>
> For days now I've been trying to figure out how I could render borders
> between England, Wales and Scotland using OSM data, but I keep  
> stumbling
> into same issues. Frankly, I think the way these things are tagged  
> in UK
> is a mess (I don't know what the situation is in other places):
>
>   1. Borders between these countries are tagged with the same
>      admin_level=4 as that of subdivisions inside England (example:
>      North East England, http://osm.org/go/evykef-?relation=151164).
>      Now I'm not a constitutional expert, but I think Wales and
>      Scotland represent different level of territorial division than
>      just a collection of England's counties. And anyway, the
>      http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dadministrative
>      states level 4 is used for "England/Scotland/Wales border" and
>      doesn't mention anything else.
>   2. There is no way to render JUST land borders. Maritime borders
>      (territorial waters) are tagged exactly the same way as their
>      continental counterparts. And even if you accept this limitation
>      and decide to render territorial waters they are usually cut off
>      in the available UK OSM extracts.
>   3. England's coast is also tagged as a border, but Wales' and
>      Scotland's isn't.
>
> Please take my criticism as a constructive one. I'm trying to use OSM
> data in a real-life situation and I think borders are some of the more
> important data, since they are usually visible in smaller-scale maps
> (but usually _without_ marked territorial waters). The way UK's  
> borders
> are now tagged, the only way to render them usefully would be to
> manually collect a list of OSM ways' IDs.
>
> Of course I could go and edit these things myself, but since I'm not
> usually covering this part of the world, I don't want to step on other
> people's toes :)

I have cross-posted this to talk-gb and I suggest that we continue the  
conversation there.

We certainly need to use different levels for the UK and england/ 
scotland/wales but as always with borders it is a bit sensitive about  
how one does it. Is Scotland a 'country' or a 'region' etc.

Regards,



Peter




>
> Best regards,
> Igor
>
> -- 
> http://igorbrejc.net
>
>
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