Hello, thanks to all for the great work on the OSM map in general and the Belgium data in special. I did already benefit a lot from the work done, and I'd like to contribute to this great project too, but I am unsure how.
At the moment I am most interested in getting the borders for administrative units, from the country as whole down to towns and communes, for Belgium straightened out (=relations tagged with boundaries=administrative and admin_level=2-10) I think there is conflicting information here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dadministrative and here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Belgium/Boundaries On the Tag:boundary=administrative page (first link) it says communities/provinces go on level 5 and arrondisments on 6 - while on the subproject page it only list the language communites on level 5 and puts provinces onto 6 (thereby moving arrondisments and towns further down) I am not sure which page describes the better solution and what way I need to look at data now. I'd like to fix the "old" data to match "new" level guide, but I am afraid of touching anything until I know which way is the "right" one and which one is the "wrong" version! My personal opinion (just my private thoughts at the moment) would be that only provinces should be on level 5 (as the tag:boundary page describes) I would move the language-based communites out of the admin_level-tagged hierarchy completly and also not use boundary=administrative (can we use boundary=language or something?) My reasons for this is that the language communites are not administrative borders (or are they? Please correct me if I am wrong here, no expert at all with this), but my even stronger point is that you got overlapping and "growing" areas while going down the hierarchy: For example the relation http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/78967 (french speaking community) is tagged as admin_level 5, and it includes the brussels area (because it is bi-lingual), while the relation "above" (admin_level 4) http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/90348 (the Walloon Region) does not include Brussels (as it is it's own region). The "area" grows bigger while moving down hierarchy levels. The same of course happens if you see it from the flemish speaking community on level 5 against the Flemish region on level 4. The french speaking community also completly overlaps the german language community in east Belgium (my home place). This is technically absolutely correct, both language do co-exists here, but in terms of tagging administrative boundaries there should be no overlapping in my eyes - but again, not sure about this either. I know that language is a delicate topic with Belgium currently, so please do not feel offended, let's try to discuss and find a solution for everybody, ok? Thanks! Ralf _______________________________________________ Talk-be mailing list Talk-be@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-be
