Vào lúc 14:27 2020-05-13, Joseph Eisenberg đã viết:
At the US talk mailing list and https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:United_States_admin_level <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:United_States_admin_level> there has been discussion about whether or not certain features should be tagged as administrative boundaries in the States of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

Thanks for everyone who has weighed in so far in this thread. By way of an update, the counties in Connecticut have regained their boundary=administrative and admin_level=6 tags. The regional councils of government (RCOGs) are currently tagged boundary=COG, and some of the mappers involved have shown interest in enriching Wikidata with the legal nuances of these administrative structures instead of making them boundary=administrative relations.

While all these States have counties, in some cases most of the government functions have been lost, and are handled by the State (admin_level=4) or Town/City government (admin_level=8).

However, I have the impression that in some countries, certain local administrative boundaries do not actually have "home rule", or the ability to make their own laws, for example in French-infuenced areas?

I think this is even clearly the case in some parts of the U.S. There are named but unorganized territories that never had a government of their own in the first place. For example, Todd County, South Dakota, is coextensive with an Indian reservation and doesn't have its own county government, but common sense would call for it to be mapped as an administrative boundary, for consistency with the surrounding organized counties.

There are also cities where neighborhood boundaries are so well-defined, well-known, and well-used that we can map them as administrative boundaries. In some cities, these neighborhoods have no councils or only advisory councils, but what matters more is that the city government and residents understand these boundaries to be the main formal way to divide locations within the city.

On the other hand, paper townships that were created as legal fictions to facilitate annexation shouldn't be mapped as administrative boundaries. After all, OSM is a resource for understanding geography, not the nuances of the legal system.

What is the minimum qualification for a boundary to be considered a boundary=administrative with an admin_level in your country?

I realize you were asking about other countries for a sense of perspective, but since I only have local knowledge in the U.S., here's an attempt at defining a set of principles for distinguishing administrative boundaries from non-administrative boundaries or non-boundaries in the U.S. (not necessarily applicable elsewhere):

* _A boundary may be disputed or undemarcated, but it should be delimited._ Otherwise, we would lead data consumers to misrepresent a subjective or poorly defined boundary as a crisp, objective line. We should not map the indeterminate boundaries of neighborhoods in many cities, nor ZIP codes, which are actually delivery routes.

* _OSM is a map, not an org chart._ If a district exists solely for a government entity to divide its workforce or allocate resources, it shouldn't be mapped as a boundary in OSM, even if it's possible to draw each district's territory. Examples of unmapped boundaries might include divisions of a state department of transportation and a city's police precincts. However, it would be a great idea to map the DOT's depot and each precinct's police station as POIs.

* _Administrative boundaries are designated by government authorities, not private entities._ A retail or residential development may have many of the trappings of a municipality, such as welcome signs or a homeowner's association that regulates front door colors. But with some rare exceptions, they aren't administrative boundaries because nothing changes about your relationship to the government depending on which side of the property boundary you stand on. Fortunately, named landuse areas can represent these boundaries decently. A religious group might divide a state into dioceses and parishes, but even if we were to map their boundaries, they would deserve a different boundary=* tag with a parallel level hierarchy.

* _Administrative boundaries are intended for the general public's everyday use, not for specialists._ It's common for junior high geography teachers to teach students about administrative boundaries but not more specialized boundaries. Welcome signs are a strong sign that a boundary is intended for the general public. A specialized boundary tends to be strongly associated with a particular government agency rather than the government as a whole. Examples of specialized boundaries are the Census Bureau's census-designated places and census tracts (for demographers), the Office of Management and Budget's metropolitan statistical areas (economists), and a city zoning agency's planning areas (planners).

* _Don't optimize around a particular data consumer's quirks [1] or map categories as relations [2]._ Even though it might be convenient to make extracts of groups of states, we'd avoid mapping the Western Governors Association as a boundary encompassing its 19 member states. Instead, we could map its headquarters as a POI and tag the member states' Wikidata items with statements about their membership in the organization.

That it. Nothing about the level of service, degree of autonomy, or amount of political maneuvering required to abolish the boundary.

These principles are imperfect: Indian reservations and school districts would be false positives according to these principles. What can I say -- I'm a mapper, not a political scientist, and there are exceptions to every rule in the U.S. Still, based on these principles, a reasonably well-educated layperson would probably be familiar with the name of each of the boundaries they live in. They would be able to tell if OSM got those boundaries terribly wrong so they could help us improve the map.

Besides, I'm already exhausted by having to spell things out in such detail to figure out where I stand on these lengthy debates. I would've loved it if we could've just left it at, "Use common sense, and consult NIST/ANSI/ISO technical standards if in doubt," but what is OSM if not gloriously overthought?

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging_for_the_renderer
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations_are_not_categories

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