Hi,
In the last couple of years I have put in a lot of hours maintaining the UK's admin boundaries in OSM. Having started in Kent (home territory) I have gradually been fanning out to cover more and more of the country. Although there is a lot of consistency in the tagging, one thing I noticed is that there are two schools of thought regarding Metropolitan Districts. These are a subdivision of Metropolitan Counties, of which there are six: Greater Manchester, Merseyside, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, West Midlands and West Yorkshire. The Metropolitan Counties still exist in law, and certain functions (e.g. Fire&Rescue, public transport) are often governed at that level. The Councils no longer exist as bodies however. The Metropolitan Districts (which are styled as Boroughs or Cities) are therefore effectively 99% the same as "unitary authorities". In the situation between 1974 and 1986 the tagging would be obvious: both the County and the District would be boundary=administrative, with admin_level=6 for the county and admin_level=8 for the districts. In OSM, things have diverged a bit since then, and proper Unitary Authorities are tagged as admin_level=6 putting them on the same level as Non-Metropolitan Counties. The current situation in OSM is: admin_level County county tag county district GM ceremonial n/a 8 Merseyside ceremonial n/a 8 S Yorks administrative 6 8 T&Wear ceremonial n/a 6 W Mids administrative 6 8 W Yorks ceremonial n/a 8 I would like to normalise this tagging, and looking at the current usage above and the wiki[1], propose that the Metropolitan Counties become boundary=ceremonial, and the Metropolitan Districts become boundary=administrative, admin_level=8. Are there any objections or other comments? If not I will make the changes in a few days' time. By the way, I have been creating a wiki page to try to give an overview of UK boundary tagging at [2]. Please look at it - any comments, corrections, additions etc are most welcome, and if people feel it's useful the content can be moved into a more "obvious" place in the wiki. Thanks, Colin [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Admin_level [2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Csmale/ukboundaries
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