Hi,
I've been thinking about the 12nm territorial borders on sea that we
have in many places, notably in Europe. Many of them seem to have been
auto-generated by simply placing a buffer around the coastline.
My first question is, do they really have legal significance? They
certainly give the impression of high precision, hugging every
protruding bit of coastline in a safe distance.
For example, if I am inside this triangle between Scotland and Ireland,
will my legal status (concerning, say, fishing quotas, or whom I can
marry on board of my vessel, or whatever funny things influcenced by
international borders) be really any different from the status I had if
I moved my vessel 2 miles in either direction?
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=55.065&lon=-5.567&zoom=10&layers=M
Or are we, by using these auto-generated (and perhaps not
human-reviewed?) borders, suggesting a precision that isn't there? Would
the UK coastguard have a good laugh when I claim to be in international
waters at that location?
My second question is, assuming that indeed there is significance to the
12 nm boundary - should such auto-generated data be in OSM at all? If
you're out on the sea, should whatever navigational aid you carry not
compute by itself how far you are from the coast, rather than telling
you whether you're to the left or to the right of a previously computed
12nm line?
And my third question is, assuming that there are really good reasons
for having these lines in OSM - who takes care of updating them once the
coastline is modified by a mapper? I think it is a rather unique
situation to have that kind of data-derived-from-other-OSM-data in OSM
itself, and thus this has many of the same problems that an import would
have (i.e. the source data has changed, what now).
I'm not saying we should delete them; but whenever I see them on the map
I tend to shrug and say "well, seems like someone was trying out his
PostGIS skillz", and somehow I have the suspicion that the 12nm line as
depicted on our maps may be little more than "that's what computer geeks
do if you tell them the border is 12 miles out...".
I'd like to hear from people who tell me that yes, these borders are
really useful to have ;)
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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