On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 10:51 PM, Paul Norman <penor...@mac.com> wrote: > In Alaska the Boroughs and CPDs are the equivalent of counties. > > I recently cleaned up much of the Canada/Alaska border and in the process > looked at the counties data. > > I have come to the conclusion that it is better and easier to remove the > existing counties data and reimport from TIGER 2012. > > Additionally Alaska created new counties in 2007 and 2008 and these are not > reflected in the existing data. > > Before I did my edits the counties were essentially untouched. Now they're > half-fixed but many remain a mess, particularly in coastal regions where > there is poor alignment. The majority of the data is in regions where the > population density is minimal and we are unlikely to get any eyes on the > ground. > > There is more detail at > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Alaska/TIGER_Counties, but in brief the > import will be more accurate, not override any existing contributions except > mine and be better tagged. > > I started a discussion about the tagging of boroughs/CPDs which are not > exactly like counties at > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2012-November/009563.html > but it shouldn't be difficult to come back later and retag if required as > there are a total of 29 objects that could potentially need retagging. It > would be a lot easier to retag them post import then to try to retag the > current data. > > I will have to integrate the data with the existing Canada/Alaska border and > will preserve that as it is based on the extremely accurate IBC data.
I have been doing a lot of work on county borders in the lower 48. I got to Alaska and the current state of the data plus the whole "unorganized borough" thing made me go "huh? I'll come back to that... later" and I haven't made it back yet due to Operation Cowboy and Thanksgiving. Given the state of the data and the changes that have happened in recent years, I think a complete reimport may be a decent way of moving forward. On the unorganized borough, I'm not really sure what the best solution is. One use for county borders in GIS applications is to associate data with them, a lot of times based on the county FIPS code. It looks like these Census Areas do have a county level FIPS code so I do think they have a place in OSM. Whether or not they get an admin_level=6 tag... I don't know. Toby _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
