[OSM-talk] Native American/First Nation, etc. Reservation Boundaries

Paul Norman penorman at mac.com
Sun Apr 21 06:50:27 UTC 2013


Are there any reservations on or near the I-5/I-405 between Canada and
Bellevue? I can divert on my way to Issaquah to attempt to ground truth some
of this.

From: Clifford Snow [mailto:clifford at snowandsnow.us] 
Sent: Saturday, April 20, 2013 10:55 PM
To: Paul Norman
Cc: Talk Openstreetmap; Paul Johnson
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Native American/First Nation, etc. Reservation
Boundaries

> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:21 PM, Paul Norman <penorman at mac.com> wrote:
> > I can’t speak for the US, but tagging of them in BC was set back by
people 
> > pushing the view that they should be tagged as provinces. There were
also 
> > issues that someone imported a bunch without geometry or tag cleanup.

> In the US, Federally recognized tribes seem to be somewhere equal to state

> or higher, thus admin level 3 would seem more appropriate. But then there 
> are cases where the the tribe occupies a small city.  Question, how does 
> the admin level impact the rendering? 

That's definitely the wrong question to be asking - whatever is appropriate,
it almost certainly isn't going to be rendered by osm.org mapnik as-is.

> > The fact that they generally cross admin_level=* boundary=administrative

> > boundaries and those boundaries cross them is a pretty strong indication

> > that they’re orthogonal to admin_level boundary. 

> I agree. 

If they're orthogonal, then why are we trying to shoehorn them into
admin_level=* boundary=administrative?

There is a strong assumption that admin_level=N areas are geometrically
admin_level=M areas, where N>M. Or alternately stated, cities are in states.
While there are some exceptions to this, this proposal would break that in
almost every case.

> > AFAIK, reservations are pretty much unique to Canada, the US and
Australia. 
> > Oddly enough, I’ve been to all of those countries.
> Lived in two, but not Australia. What about New Zealand for example the 
> Maori? Because of treaties, how we tag the boundaries, may be universal. 

Ah yes, I was wondering about NZ. In any case, reservations definitely are
not world-wide.




More information about the talk mailing list