The census bureau divided the unorganized borough into 11 census areas. These have no legal significance but serve to sub-divided the state into convenient parts. In spite of this they are in many ways like counties. I've tagged them the same as counties (admin_level=6) but I'm not convinced that this is the best tagging.
If they're just a census division, it seems wrong to call them boroughs (treating them like counties with a different name). Boroughs as counties seem right - it's the way the state divides things less than a state and more than a town. The point of admin_level is government, and census boundaries (for the sole convenience of the census bureau, presumably) are not in any way governments. I think the real question is whether the unorganized borough is really a borough, or just a way to refer to land in the state not in a borough. This would affect whether there was a boundary (multipolygon presumably) for the unorganized borough. Having read the wikipedia page, I'd argue that the unorganized borough is to organized boroughs as unincorporated areas are to towns, and thus should not have a boundary way. Or if it does, it should not have an admin_level tag, but some other tag. I'm not sure where the way showing the limit of the coastline boroughs should be. Currently it is an approximated offset coastline with digitizing artifacts. The options I see are (1) The 12 nautical mile limit (US territorial sea claims) (2) The 3 nautical mile limit (state submerged land limit, traditional territorial sea claims limit) (3) The coastline way (4) The existing crudely drawn inaccurate imported limit. A very good question, and one I've been wondering about for Massachusetts. I think you'll have to look to state law (and perhaps federal) to see whether the area of ocean between (3) and (2) and between (2) and (1) are considered part of the borough. I would expect that (1) is the right answer for the state boundary.
pgpXVHzP4zbTM.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

