On 22/08/17 12:23, Colin Smale wrote: > If you ask people where they live, they will probably talk about the > county level and the settlement/town/city, but the informal boundaries > of these settlements will likely not follow the administrative > boundaries. In fact, it may not be possible to agree a polygon with a > sharp boundary of what constitutes a settlement with a given name. Most > place=* polygons in OSM just follow the boundary of the built-up area. > > So I see a possible role for is_in - to help out geocoding where > geometrical methods lead to an undesirable (though accurate) result.
Middlesex ceased to exist in 1965 yet many people still use it in their postal address ... there is certainly no boundary for it on OSM :) To add to the fun, facebook's allowed list of places miss-identifies this area of London in the same way as the other areas that became London Boroughs back then and this is creating a mess in Facebook's use as a business platform. Starting with a list of the current official designations from the ONS database has to be the correct currently accurate information, but while there should be a boundary associated with each entry, a simple list of elements does not need to be overloaded with all of the way information providing that boundary. It is a secondary relation to the base 'name'. http://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/datasets/0e7bbf9926584a57a2818c64f01d0bfe_0/data provides a list of the official COUNTRIES in the United Kingdom but even that is probably inaccurate in relation to is Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom? ( At some time will Scottish translations also be added? ) The Open Geography Portal provides a list of data and the basis for checking that within OSM, but it will be easier to complete a complete mirror of is_in: hierarchy which can be updated as changes appear in the ONS dataset and THEN associate boundaries as appropriate. -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
