This discussion about the national status of England, Scotland, Wales
and Ulster is very entertaining but is not going to reach a
conclusion without another war. Personally I would give these
countries the same status as states as they are effectively states
within the United Kingdom or (with the exception of Ulster) Great
Britain.
This strand of the discussion (below) though echoes the earlier
thread I kicked off (but gave up pursuing because there seemed to be
more prejudice than logic in the discussion) about the idea of
numerically-based properties in the database mapped to human-friendly
language in editors and viewers. Most of that discussion was about
highways but similar arguments seem to apply to boundaries. I think
most British mappers would be happier selecting from a boundary sub-
menu of 'National', 'County', 'District', 'parish', with each choice
invisibly mapped back to the appropriate numerical boundary type than
with the clumsy 'boundary=administrative' 'admin_level=4' approach.
In other countries/languages, other words would map to the same numbers.
But isn't this democratic/anarchic approach to mapping great? I'm
going to put a national/state level boundary around our village and
name it Isle of Man, resulting in some worthwhile reductions in taxes
and a free grandstand seat for the TT races next month :-)
elvin ibbotson
From: Shaun McDonald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 29 May 2008 13:43:43 BDT
To: Bruce Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: talk@openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] National borders in the British Islands
On 29 May 2008, at 13:31, Bruce Cowan wrote:
Seriously, the number system for borders is rather strange, surely
there
must be a more obvious scale. I suppose this has been mentioned before
though.
I thought people are using things like district, country, city, town
etc for the boundaries, rather than a numeric value.
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