On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 8:22 AM Mateusz Konieczny <matkoni...@tutanota.com> wrote:
> I think a country relation should describe how the specific country think > of its borders. So if two countries claim the same territory, those two > relations will overlap. > > That is absurd and conflict with OSM rule to map what exists. > On the contrary, it actually matches OSM rules better than deciding yourself. When drawing a city outline, you go to that city's government, and get the geoshape from them. By extension, if you draw a country, you should use that country's definition. If two country's definitions happen to overlap, we ought to document both. > E.g. it would be illegal in some countries to generate political map not > according to that country's government. > > It is also against Chinese law to publish accurate maps of China. It is > not a sufficient reason to forbid accurate mapping of China in OSM. > I did not say we must abide by laws of every country - would not be possible in case of conflicts. I only said that some countries require you to draw maps according to their laws. China is clearly a special case here, but other countries are much more reasonable, yet still expect you to draw their maps for them according to their rules. > So when I generate a map for Russia, I have to show Crimea as part of > Russia. For Ukraine - as part of Ukraine. Same for China and India and ... > > There are also other sources of data. For example to show proper terrain > shape or to show ratings of restaurants and for many others use cases OSM > is not sufficient. > The argument "it doesn't work for X, therefor we shouldn't make it work for Y" is puzzling. We can easily make it work for the very practical usecase I outlined -- drawing countries' borders based on the expectations of a specific user's location. Country borders are by definition a controversial topic without a single answer, and as you said, there are other data sources for it. Yet we add it to OSM because it has a very tangible value to the data consumers (who don't have to mix-in multiple data sources for the basic mapping needs).
_______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk