Gulf of America - Gulf of Mexico

General talk
104

Oh, yes, great diary. The disputed places mapping in India is comprehensive. A local language map could choose sides similar to how Google does it.

105

The Congressional Research Service (a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress) just released a report about the order’s implications for the federal government. The report is an interesting look into the mechanics of carrying out a rename. Regarding some of the earlier points in this thread:

Similar disputes could arise surrounding the naming of the Gulf of America. To address such discrepancies, the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN)—an international body established by the UN Economic and Social Council—has issued a resolution indicating that “when countries sharing a given geographical feature do not succeed in agreeing on a common name
 the name used by each of the countries concerned will be accepted” (Resolution II/25). Thus, depending on the context, one or both of the “Gulf of America” and “Gulf of Mexico” may appear on international maps or publications.

Similarly, BGN decisions are not required to be adopted for nonfederal domestic publications. For decades, the Alaska State government has used “Denali” in place of “Mount McKinley” on state publications and maps. The recent E.O. would not mandate changes to the usage of “Denali” by the State of Alaska. Private companies such as Google Maps and Apple Maps would similarly be unaffected by the E.O. Despite this, some nonfederal entities may choose to adopt BGN naming conventions moving forward.

At this point, we should recall that OSM already differs from federal government geography in a number of ways, even domestically. For example, after a whole ordeal last month, we decided that, contrary to the federal government’s position, San Francisco County doesn’t exist, and there’s no such administrative boundary as Washington, D.C.[1] It’s probably only a matter of time before we once again divide Connecticut by counties instead of planning regions, again in opposition to most of the federal government. The reasoning is too involved to discuss here, but suffice it to say that one government’s viewpoint isn’t always definitive for the nuanced kind of map we’re making.

I think it’s telling that the CRS report says nothing about the distinction between the U.S. portion of the gulf and the gulf as a whole. Indeed, I’ve yet to come across any mainstream media report that qualifies the renaming in this manner. Maybe I’m just not very confident in my armchair lawyering skills, but unless actual colloquial or official usage moves in this direction, I would put it on the back shelf as an obscure legal quirk.

This tagging scheme is unfortunately incompletely implemented. Also, it’s designed for boundary=administrative relations and their constituent ways. Translating this scheme to the Gulf, we’d need to maintain a second node alongside the existing place=sea node, tagging it as something like
 place=disputed or disputed:place=sea? If so, then we don’t have to overthink the naming; name=* and name:en=* would suffice for the “disputed” sea.

As far as I can tell, this would be a totally novel approach in OSM, one that we haven’t employed for the nearby Gulf of California / Sea of CortĂ©z or even more fraught situations like the South China Sea. I think a solution like this would only become necessary if we become convinced that Gulf of America really does refer to a different feature with a different geometry than Gulf of Mexico.

  1. But the District of Columbia is an administrative boundary. ↩

8 Likes
106

The alt_name:en_us or official_name:en_us suggestions upthread don’t resolve the country vs. language situation, so I was looking for something that could describe the fact that a country (not a language) names a thing a certain way that might be different from the rest of the world. I agree that it’s not a disputed boundary, but it does seem to fit the disputed concept.

1 Like
107

This situation is only novel because of how suddenly and forcefully it arrived in current events. Otherwise, I’m not sure the slight ambiguity necessitates a novel approach to modeling the gulf.

Previous suggestions have focused on how to acknowledge Gulf of America in a manner that mollifies partisan mappers looking at the raw data and exposes the name to search engines. The disputed boundary tagging scheme enables alternative rendering; one could use it to set up, for example, a “U.S. worldview” map of the sort that Mapbox provides out of the box. For sure, an official worldview consists of more than boundaries, but in this case, it seems to me like overkill to maintain a separate feature, only to devise ways for unsuspecting data consumers to avoid processing it by default.

If neither nat_name:en-US=* nor official_name:en-US=* is quite accurate, and alt_name=* is too messy for alt_name:en-US=* to ever be used by renderers, then there is a scheme for tagging a feature with different names according to different authorities. For example, this train station is tagged with name:TEC=* to indicate its name according to Transport En Commun. While this tagging scheme doesn’t necessarily conflict with the language tagging scheme, it comes perilously close: this town is tagged name:tec=* to indicate its Terik-language name. name:US:BGN=* would avoid conflicts with other tagging schemes and also clarify exactly who uses the name. But it’s still obscure enough that I’m unsure of the practical benefit over just using alt_name:en-US=* and maybe source:alt_name:en-US=*.

2 Likes
108

Especially when, in 3 years 11 months & ~8 days, it could have to be changed back again!

1 Like
109

I’m enjoying the utter lack of geographical knowledge. It’s as if people think the Gulf of Mexico was only the bit of water that they could see from the southern shore of the US. The EO explicitly refers to 45% of the IHO recognised boundaries of the Gulf.

110

While we’re at it, is there a consensus on Denali? There have been several edits there too, and right now name, name:en, official_name, and old_name are all set to Mount McKinley. Denali doesn’t even get an “alt_name” and is referenced only in old_name:2015-2025 (and in some languages other than English).

1 Like
111

I see several more “Denali” tags on the peak now, not all of which I’m certain I agree with.

“Denali” has been the name of the entire park since 1980 when the smaller Mount McKinley National Park was absorbed to become Denali National Park and Preserve, with the Denali State Park next door. Those names aren’t being reverted and people will continue to “go to Denali”

112

I propose the following changes at a minimum (compared to version 49):

BeforeAfter 
official_name=Mount McKinley
old_name=Mount McKinley
old_name:-1917=Denali
old_name:1917-2015=Mount McKinley
old_name:2015-2025=Denali
old_name:en=Mount McKinley

alt_name=whatever isn’t in name
nat_name=Mount McKinley
reg_name=Denali
loc_name=Denali

I think the national/regional/local tags are slightly more suitable than the distinction between old and official names. Any official_name=* tag is a gross oversimplification, because Alaska’s state government has been even more adamant than the federal government about the mountain’s official English name. Moreover, Alaska has a couple dozen official languages while the United States has zero. This is not to say that usage of Denali is confined to the state; I’d expect it to appear in either name=* or alt_name=* to cover colloquial usage elsewhere.

The datespec tags are unnecessary detail for OSM. OpenHistoricalMap and Wikidata are already tracking the mountain’s name history adequately.

10 Likes
113

As long as the data-namespaced tags refer to an entity currently in existence, I find it to be completely within the scope of OpenStreetMap. An entity’s historical name is as much part of its full identity as its current one. It is extremely useful to offer some guidance on the names used, and can help to provide context to old_name and alt_name. Where many historical names exist, I find the date-namespaces preferable to one huge semicolon-delimited old_name, and sometimes this is necessary to stay below the character limit of that tag.

When an entity is renamed, the date-namespaced tags also help inform other mappers of the point where those names started and stopped being used (e.g., when something like a museum or hospital formally changes names), and help in understanding why something is now called different than what you expected it to be.

Historical names are valuable, because they allow users to find those entities under those names, which is useful when you are working with historical data and texts where those names are used.

Wikidata is another project (where the goals of the contributors there do not necessarily align with our pragmatic ground-truth values). We might as well just limit every OSM object to only the wikidata tag and stuff every bit of data in there if we depend on that project to house our data (plurality and redundancy is good).

By the way, stripping those date-namespaced names because you don’t find them necessary seems to go counter to Any tags you like, unless that data is actually wrong.

4 Likes
114

Actually think it was Dubaya who pulled a fast one writing (US?) English in as the official (government(???) language, but in a few decades Spanish might become the main used tongue in the lower 48 of maybe soon 52 or 53
 the Star Spangled Banner needs fixing with new ones, made in China of course. The current events show a certain group is very seriously perturbed about much.

The Med wiki shows one thing, but there are many sub areas included in that. We can still call the whole the Gulf of Mexico and map out a sub area naming whatever his nationalism tickles. The zoom level might then determine which name comes into focus.

2 Likes
115

I’d like it if more people recognized that the election and furher events in the USA have shown a very divided country and there is still a lot of strife and hardship going on every day.

For OSM to take up this “debate” is basically to stand in between some people that are always at the edge of yelling at each other. It is just going to include openstreetmap as an organization and indeed the heroic volunteers in a mess that has little to nothing to do with the actual issue that the headline indicates.

The best thing to do is to just freeze any and all editing for, say, another month. Let the people heal and work out their differences in real life first.

9 Likes
116

While we are at it, I was looking at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multilingual_names and it says

Always add name:code=* for each involved language, and for compatibility with older rendering engines, also set name=* to both names, separated by a forward slash with spaces in between, sorted in (a somewhat neutral) Unicode alphabetical order.

Given this rule, shouldn’t the default name tag for the gulf of mexico be “Gulf of Mexico / Golfo de Mexico”

117

I don’t disagree – in fact, I was the one who first added an old_name=* to this bay in Russia to reflect its century-long identity as the Gulf of America. You can’t make this stuff up! However, indicating either Denali or Mount McKinley as the old name of the mountain in Alaska would be an oversimplification, even if you qualify it by dates and languages. Better to leave things a little vague, to avoid setting unsatisfiable expectations.

Wikidata does a still imperfect but better job of modeling the nuance using qualifiers, an element of expressiveness that OSM’s data model unfortunately doesn’t provide. In its own way, OHM can also tell the same story but in a form factor close enough to OSM to give OSM some breathing room.

The date-qualified tags are at best misleading. They paper over the longstanding differences between official and colloquial usage, between federal and local usage, between English and non-English speakers, and between native-born Alaskans and expats from McKinley’s home state of Ohio, and nowadays also between left-wing and right-wing discourse. To say that a name is “old” is to delegitimize it to a significant extent. In this geopolitical dispute with many cross-currents, you won’t find a better way to come across as non-neutral and political.

I don’t know about Mexico or Cuba, but in the United States, the slash delimiter is quite controversial (and I disagree with it). If you’d like to add another dispute to the pile, here’s a starting point:

6 Likes
118

That’s been part of that page (describing shared boundary features, not disputes) since basically forever, but I suspect that whoever wrote it was unfamiliar with the full range of ways of handling those issues used across OSM even then.

119

I don’t think there’s any respectable argument to be made in favor of changing name=* for Denali or the Gulf of Mexico. not:name=* seems to be a good key for those values.

6 Likes
120

Since the vast majority of the area of ​​this gulf is not under US jurisdiction and the English language is used by several countries, I would only change name:en after Wikipedia did so as well (see their discussion). And if and when the change finally happens (which may be never), then add alt_name:en=Gulf of Mexico as many English speakers will still use the current name as the official name.

121

I was trying to make a similar point last year in a thread about micronations. Prominent mappers were adamant that the “local claims” as to admin_level were ridiculous and had to be treated as vandalism, and I tried unsuccessfully to argue that it was not so different from the divergence between us French and some international bodies about the administrative level of some islands, e.g RĂ©union. In my view these all are cases of juxtaposed points of views (or juxtaposed reference systems) from various authorities.

I must say that I am (kind of perversely) glad that the same kind of topic is now raised not by a few marginals on a disused oil platform but by a somewhat influential world leader :smiley:

More seriously I believe that the solution proposed above by Minh has the potential to solve many of those cases of conflicting authorities.

1 Like
122

A long time ago we had a discussion about mapping national boundaries according to different viewpoints. One part of the discussion was about who was entitled to a mappable viewpoint in the first place - since we don’t want every person on the planet mapping their viewpoint! A similar discussion could probably be had here - who is a “various authority” and who is just a nutcase :wink:

4 Likes
123

This thread has been covered in the news by Wired author Paresh Dave:

16 Likes