Choosing a tagging scheme for disputed boundaries

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@InsertUser

Not knowing the background I would say that disputed=yes seems redundant when combined with boundary=disputed. By analogy to things like the construction tags I would expect something more along the lines of disputed=administrative.

Yes, I wonder if this guidance on the wiki is conflating two different tagging schemes:

• boundary=administrative/protected_area/etc. plus disputed=yes
• boundary=disputed (with a poor assumption that only administrative boundaries can be disputed)

Naïvely, I would expect disputed=yes to be unnecessary if there’s already enough information to tag disputed_by=*. By analogy, community_adopted=* becomes unnecessary if community_adopter=* is present.

@InsertUser

In the reefs example I would assume disputed=yes to be raising doubts about their existence rather than their ownership.

Good point. If I remember correctly, there are several features in the South China Sea whose very nature or existence is disputed. A general disputed=yes would be useful for that purpose, although one could argue that it’s a bit of a troll tag and should be replaced by a lifecycle prefix instead. disputed:boundary=administrative does appear on a few features in the Philippines, but this seems to be because of dual-tagging a boundary on a waterway rather than creating a relation.

@InsertUser

I vaguely remember there being a more comprehensive tagging system for mapping overlapping and conflicting claims, but it looks like there may just have been discussions about making one rather than a finalised proposal?

Yes, it was all discussions, from the looks of it. It figures that OSM would respond to the issue of disputed boundaries by creating an indeterminate state of affairs.

Back in 2019, @nvk tried to resolve the situation somewhat by adding disputed=yes, claimed_by=*, and recognized_by=* to known international boundary disputes. It looks like he focused on South Asia but didn’t get around to disputes elsewhere, like in the South China Sea. Nextzen/Tilezen supports all three of these keys, though recognised_by=* seems to be more than twice as common as recognized_by=*. Do we need to account for linguistic disputes too?

For its part, OpenMapTiles does something muddled involving disputed=* or dispute=* or border_status=disputed or disputed_by=* to determine whether the boundary is disputed. It also exposes disputed_name=* and claimed_by=*. However, not all of these keys have ever appeared in the OSM database. I’m unsure if it’s a case of the developers throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, or if there was a corresponding discussion somewhere that ended without consensus.