"CP" is part of the name in the OS Boundary-Line data. There doesn't
seem to be any consensus or guidelines about what to put in the "name"
tag. Should it be "Dartford" or "Dartford Borough" or "Borough of
Dartford" or "Dartford Council" or something else? Is it naming the
area, or the administrative entity governing it? As there are very many
cases of areas at many levels named identically, from counties down to
parishes, there needs to be some way of distinguishing between them.
We have to watch out that we continue to distinguish distinct, unrelated
"hierarchies". In particular "parish" and "ward" mean different things
according to the context. There are civil parishes, which are (by
definition) a subarea of a higher-level local authority (normally
district/borough or unitary authority) and ecclesiastical parishes: each
religion/denomination has its own hierarchy of areas. The NHS has a
geographic hierarchy as has Fire and Rescue. But they have only a
certain correlation to governmental areas, with cases of one fire
service serving multiple counties, and a counties being covered by
multiple fire services (although I don't have an example of this to hand).
An area at admin level 10 might be a civil parish, it might be an
ecclesiastical parish, it might be an electoral ward etc etc. To me,
boundary=administrative means the boundary belongs to "government",
which means it starts at level 2 with countries (leaving room for
supra-national levels such as the EU) and includes regions, counties,
unitary authorities, districts and civil parishes. Wards in this
hierarchy should really be at admin level 11 (i.e. inferior to
parishes). There are some special cases which don't fit the 100%: the
Scilly Isles and City of London spring to mind. There is a hierarchy of
parliamentary-electoral areas as well; the lowest quantum is the "ward"
but these are not the same as the wards for local council purposes.
There are many "unparished" areas. Many of these correspond to former
local authorities in urban areas. A civil parish has (normally) a parish
council, but unparished areas do not. There is no administrative entity
for these areas at that level - they are governed directly from above
(district/unitary level). However many of these areas are still tagged
as if the former LA still existed.
I and some other users have started to use "designation" to further
qualify the tagging. Adding designation=civil_parish makes it
unambiguous; admin_level=10 also gets used for "towns" which are not CPs
(official Town Councils are actually CPs by another name). You might
think of doing something similar with Westminster electoral wards - they
are not "by definition" the same as council wards. In any case they
should IMHO not be boundary=administrative but boundary=political.
Colin
On 23/09/2012 15:41, Lester Caine wrote:
OK
I'm buried deep into this and getting totally lost ...
I'm using http://layers.openstreetmap.fr/ to check what needs doing
We have 'admin?' levels
5=Regions ... so West Midlands
6=Counties ... But Manchester and some Welsh ones are missing?
7=Not used ... But I wonder if 'Unitary Authorities' might be better
here?
8='Districts' ... But I'm not sure WHAT is currently set here?
Should this be 'local_authority'?
9=Not Used
10=Parish ... Has some way to go, but why is CP appended to some areas
and not others? The files I've checked have CP as part of the title so
should we not standardise on that?
The French have added a separate 'local_authority'
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dlocal_authority
But we have been having a discussion on the main talk list about them
doing their own thing ;)
We could legitimise that by using it?
I then have
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dpolitical
With political_division of:
parl_const
county_division
ward
But we only seem to have a very small number of wards loaded?
My immediate 'need' is to add a couple of constituencies and their
wards , but I'm having trouble unravelling the 9 different data sets
in the Boundary Line set.
I think I need 'district_borough_unitary_ward_region' for the wards,
but is it then 'westminster_const_region' for the constituency
boundaries?
Next step is what has already been converted and who is already adding
stuff ...
I've located 'county', district' and 'parish' but I assume that I need
to process the ward data myself :)
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