Proposal:Administrative area

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Administrative area
Proposal status: Canceled (inactive)
Proposed by: *
Tagging: *=*
Statistics:

Rendered as: *
Draft started: 2006-08-31
Vote start: *
Vote end: *

this is a duplication of is_in, it has been removed from the proposals page

Key name: city

This tag defines what "city" a given street (or other named feature) belongs to.

Without going too much into the various administrative definitions of countries, I think for the purposes of OSM a "city" should be defined as "a collection of streets where the same streetname does not appear in more than one distinct street".

I think this feature is very useful for routing software, which would have no other reliable way to know which street you mean when you say "street X, in city Y", if the same name "X" also appears in cities other than Y.

An alternative way to include this information could be to define areas corresponding to administrative boundaries; however, in most countries such data are copyrighted, and cannot be easily obtained from a GPS walk, since boundaries don't necessarily follow walkable/drivable paths.

The key name city is perhaps not the best possible choice; suggestions are welcome.

  • locality=...? Ojw 20:15, 6 September 2006 (BST)

Note also that a similar problem can exist with provinces (or regions, or departments, or ...), if you define "province" as "an area where no two cities can have the same name". This is because in a few countries there are cities with the same name.

The original Map_Featuers list contains "place_name" under the naming section, the same section you find "postal_code". I used it a fair bit in the early days on some of the nodes and segments in Sutton Coldfield. Possibly place_name does not fit the full use that you might want but I do agree that we should have a set of keys that can be used to spell out a full text address on a node and partial text address on other features. In that respect city would form a part of the set and would include presumably "property_number", "property_name", "street_name" (needed on a node), "city", "region", "country", "postal_code". The current "place_numbers" would probably go, although there is an interest in keeping some means of tagging a segment with the range of house numbers since that information can be found on some street signs. Blackadder 09:05, 7 September 2006 (BST)
I'd suggest using address:street, address:street2, address:city, address:postal_code for specific address related stuff (the stuff you would e.g. add when you put a node down for restaurants, hotels, etc). Maybe add address:email, address:telephone, address:telephone2, address:fax as well. Xaa 16:05, 7 September 2007 (CET)

Last edit

LjL 21:10, 31 Aug 2006 (BST)

this is a duplication of is_in, it has been removed from the proposals page