Hi All!
Could you please help me? I am looking at the map of Germany and got the following question:
What does tag de:place mean and why it is used in Germany instead of just place? e.g. de:place=city instead of just place:city
some examples are:
I try to give an explanation. Dear users, if you find a mistake, please, correct me.
de:place is a tag, which is used on borders (ways or relations) in Germany, a standard tag place is used for labels (nodes):
[Politische Grenze](DE:Grenze zeichnen - OpenStreetMap Wiki Grenze):
Politische Grenze - political border,
kreisfreie Städt - an important city, which has higher administrative level, than “normal” town (equals to district of land), see list - I suppose, that borders of all such cities have tags admin_level=6 + de:place=city (Berlin and Hamburg have even higher level - admin_level=4),
Landkreis - district of one of German states,
kreisangehörige Städt - a “middle” town, which is rather important inside district,
Gemeinde - municipality.
See also administrative division of Germany.
Relation anlegen - creation of relation,
wenn die Gemeinde Stadtrechte hat oder nicht - when municipality has a status of town or not,
wenn die Gemeinde keine Stadtrechte hat - when municipality has a status of not town.
Also I’ve found the value de:place=suburb, which is not marked in wiki, but is de-facto used for Ortsteil (district of settlement or municipality).
bin ich der einzige, dem bis heute de:place nichts gesagt hat?
Hier ist es ins Wiki geschrieben worden.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=DE%3AGrenze_zeichnen&diff=746747&oldid=746641
An eine Diskussion kann ich mich nicht erinnern.
Die Grenzen in meiner Gegend haben kein de:place. Ich weiß jetzt aber nicht, ob 1600 Verwendungen viel oder wenig ist…keine Ahnung wieviel Grenzen es in DE gibt.
http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/de%3Aplace#overview
A little bit more precise diff - link (and second diff).
As I understand, 1600 objects are exactly 15% of all municipalities (Gemeinde) in Germany (total: 11200). On the one hand, we can say, that it is much less, than 99%, but, on the other hand, we have 100 objects with de:place=city, which cover (almost) all major cities in Germany (kreisfreie Städte).
I don’t understand, what was the reason for using de:place instead of place, but we see, that it is really in use now. place or de:place is one of the simplest way to determine polygons of cities (the difficulty of automatic work is in admin_level=6, which have such cities). Perhaps, we should change de:place to standard place in wiki, but the fact is, that we have already had 1600 objects with useful tag. I think, there is no sense to delete it or change simultaneously to place.
de:place hört sich nach einem Blödsinn an. Wenn etwas mit de: anfängt, die zulässigen Werte aber alle englischsprachig sind, ist das absolut unlogisch.
I propose to change de:place to place here and here and add a notices, that now we have some quantity of objects with tag de:place, which is used as a place.
The topic starter wanted to know, why tag de:place is in use instead of place in Germany. If I understand correctly, the answer is “because Ajoessen changed place to de:place (example)”
Well I personally agree with you that de:place does not sound appropriate. The guy who changed it left OSM after a dispute and is missed a lot for the help he gave here and elsewhere. To be honest, although I personally see no value in de:place, I don’t understand why it does disturb you so much. It is there, yes, but it does not collide with something. Why are you so keen to fix it?
I wrote about changing text in wiki after post of fkv. I think, that place is better, because it is standard tag, but de:place is not disturbing me (because de:place doesn’t collide with another tags and, for example, can be used both as a single tag and as a tag, parallel with place). Important thing is to have unified understanding of existing tag. If fkv and other editors don’t have оbjections against de:place, we can save status quo (tags in osm-database and text in wiki). The only thing, which should not to do - delete useful tag (“useful tag” in this case - tag, which is documented and has intelligible and real method of using).
…after some thoughts I want to mention, that de:place is not identical to place, because de:place has concrete tie with administrative system of Germany. We can interprete de:place as a place in Germany (Germany has DE code in ISO 3166).
As an Austrian I don’t really care about data garbage in DE. Nevertheless, de:place is nonsense. Even if you rename it, there would still be no use for it. The level of administrative units is defined by admin_level=*, and the correspondent place node can be defined by the admin_centre member of the boundary relation.
Of course we can ignore the bogus tag, but as long as it’s there (and suggested in the Wiki), people will always do unnecessary work mantaining it. And data users may go wrong by using it.
There are several problems. 1) Units with the same administrative level can be both as single municipality and as a part of a city. 2) Not all boundary relations have admin_centre member.
You guess, that adding of this tag is unnecessary work - what do you think about adding a notice, that there is an opinion about redundancy of this tag and existing alternative methods to determine appropriate administrative units? I don’t think, that full deletion of this tag is a good idea, because it has evident utility minimum for major cities (kreisfreie Städte), which have “non-standard” administrative level (4 or 6 instead of 8 for “standard” settlement/municipality).
That’s what I thought too. However, ajoessen wrote me that there is no way to distinguish between a municipality that is not associated with a county (kreisfreie Stadt) and a county (Kreis). The existing admin_level scheme does not allow this distinction hence there is an extra information provided by this tag.
Rather than deleting it in the wiki, I would suggest to rephrase the wiki and making the purpose of the tag more visible. This would allow the mappers to decide whether to add that tag or not.
Das geht aber mit dem Amtlichen Gemeindeschlüssel, oder nicht?
Im Prinzip ja, aber wer weiß das schon? Für Nichtdeutsche völlig hoffnungslos.
Ich kenne die Diskussion nicht von Anfang an, aber de:place könnte auch aus dem Dissens heraus verwendet worden sein, ob place mit allen Zusatzinformationen nur auf einem Node innerhalb des Gebietes stehen oder ob es in die boundary-Relation verschoben werden darf.
Besser finde ich die Lösung, das in einen Knoten admin_centre zu verlagern, der den Verwaltungssitz anzeigt und Teil der boundary-Relation ist. Das ist aber noch ziemlich selten zu finden und wird von den QA-Tools zu den boundary-Relationen auch noch angemeckert.
short in English:
de:place was perhaps partially used because of dissent whether to tag place and its attributes to a single place node or as additional attributes within the corresponding boundary relation (“unofficial use”).
place=* → single node
de:place → within relations
I support this suggestion.
Indeed, analyzing the Amtliche Gemeindeschlüssel is an alternative method to distinguish kreisfreien Städten from Landkreise. But I think, that we should acknowledge, that this method is more complicated, than consideration of de:place.
If I understood you correctly (excuse me, I’m not sure, that understood 100% of your phrases), your comprehension adjusted with current text in wiki, where it is written, that de:place should be added to relation of boundary.
Finally, I suggest to add to wiki roughly such text: “Sometimes, we need to determine, what the object is: municipality inside district, independent city or district. There a several methods to do it. One of them is analyzing Amtliche Gemeindeschlüssel (Die letzten drei Ziffern schließlich unterscheidet die Gemeinden innerhalb eines Landkreises. Bei kreisfreien Städten stehen an dieser Stelle drei Nullen). This method can be used, but is relatively complicated. Another method is using at relation of boundary additional tag de:place, which meaning is analogous to tag place, which is used on nodes. When using second method we should add de:place=city for kreisfreie Städte, de:place=county for Landkreise, de:place=town for kreisangehörige Städte and de:place=village for Gemeinden. At this moment tag de:place is added almost to all kreisfreie Städte and to many Gemeinde.” This is only a draft - so, please, rephrase it, if there are some incorrect words in it.
Will do it, but let us wait some days if someone has objections. Although it is no addition or deletion but only a clarification, I am hesitating to change the german wiki because it is holy cow…at least for me and some other people.
btw… Да ли разумеш немачки? или ты понимаешь немецкий?
Thank you! Of course, we can wait for opinions of other editors.
I have some knowledge of German, but it has level, which asks me to avoid writing long phrases in german wiki in situations, when there is a speaker with advanced level of language, who graciously offer to do it:P