On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 10:29:25AM +0100, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote: > 2014-11-24 21:18 GMT+01:00 Minh Nguyen <m...@nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us>: > > > Assuming this table reflects the actual state of the map, most countries > > have chosen 4 for their state equivalents. > > > > > Actually, many countries do not have something like a "state equivalent", > it is a particularity of the USA because they are a federal republic.
admin_levels have been invented "in order that different borders can be rendered consistently among countries" according to the wiki[1]. That's also what I remember. "State eqivalent" doesn't mean that they must be organised exactly in the same way but that they are roughly at the same level of administrative hierarchies. Under that definition US states are the same as German bundesländer, French regions, Canadian provinces etc. even though their political influence and internal organzisation is wildly different. There is a lot of software around that works under the assumption that US states (and the equivalents in other countries) can be found at admin_level=4. The current admin level hierarchy is not perfect but it works for most practical applications. Please don't break it. If you need to have a more find-grained distinction on how the administrative units are organised, I suggest introducing a new tag instead of changing the meaning of a well-established one. Kind regards Sarah [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Admin_level#admin_level _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
