On 2015-03-25 09:54, Bryce Nesbitt wrote:
There are many defacto boundaries created by roads, hedges, powerlines,
ridges or bodies of water.
I argue the most appropriate boundary in OSM is indeed the defacto
boundary. If people are using, paving, weeding
and farming the boundary, that's the one we can map.
The legal boundary is not something OSM can adjudicate. Finding that
boundary is a complex process involving survey points, land
descriptions, and often handwritten records stored in dark basements.
It also hardy ever matters, at least to a mapper or map reader.
That may be true when it comes to private property, but the de jure
boundary of a given village, county, etc. matters to many members of the
general public, all of whom could wind up reading our map. To the extent
that a given place has a de facto boundary -- which I take to mean a
boundary not *administered* by a government -- we shouldn't map it as an
*administrative* boundary, and we should avoid mapping overly subjective
data in fine detail anyways.
I would imagine that administrative boundaries like city limits are a
matter of public record. Granted, the public record isn't necessarily
free or online, and the city may well store it in a dark basement. But
where we can ascertain the legal definition of a city limit while
respecting our copyright policies, we provide a valuable service by
turning that prose into free geodata correlated with other features like
roads. TIGER gets us most of the way there for city limits but not for a
major city's political subdivisions.
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