We could drop the level8 boundaries but are you sure that is really a good idea? New Zealand doesn’t see to have an awful lot of area features for the places. Looking at a few the boundaries, they seem to come out okayish and some of them even have the wikipedia/wikidata links to the community itself. So it might be good to just leave them in as the area for the respective communities. Doing address calculation only with the place nodes is always more prone to error.
That is a common misconception about Nominatim. It doesn’t return “addresses” as such, it returns what I like to call a “location descriptions”: a sorted list of useful reference points that help placing the result. The list intentionally prefers to err on the side of including too much. That’s because it has to work with messy OSM data on a world-wide base. (But it’s also because I find result lists of competing software that presents you a choice of ten undistigishuable “Newtown, New Zealand” not particularly useful. )
Government structures tend to wary widely over the world, which makes it very difficult to find a unified structure. If you look at what other database have done, you’ll find that they generally start with a structure that fits their country of origin and a couple of close-by countries (and usually only fits well for urban areas) and when they expand to other countries (or in the country-side), they just bend the local structure until it fits into what they already have.
OSM goes a different way here. We let the the local communities optimise for their local situation and expect the data user to normalise on their side. The advantage is that OSM has a lot more nuances than any other database. The disadvantage is that the normalisation can go wrong at times.
The other aspect to take into account here is that the administrative structure of a country is not necessarily the same as the human perception of the structure of the country. And that again may be different from how the postal service partitions the country in order to create official addresses. In OSM, boundary=administrative correctly reflects the governmental idea of country structure, which doesn’t make it always useful for the second. We do have place=* tags for the human perception but given the rather fuzzy nature of defining human perception, the data in OSM is still inconsistent. For addresses, we have yet another schema, the addr:* tags. Sadly, that goes only on address points and isn’t applicable for non-addressable features.
In short, OSM data isn’t really meant to be ready for consumption. Nominatim is one software that is supposed to do much of the normalisation. In fact, it has a geocodejson output format, which returns neatly sorted address categories state, city, suburb, street, etc. So pretty much doing what you ask.
I appreciate the technical explanations, but I think the core issue is being missed.
The inconsistency is within New Zealand, not between countries.
At the same admin_level (8), at the same zoom level, in the same country:
Wellington appears as “Wellington” - a visible, appropriately-sized city
Auckland appears as “Tāmaki Makaurau” or “Waitematā” - tiny Local Board fragments
Auckland is NZ’s largest city (~1.6M population), significantly larger than Wellington (~200K). Yet Auckland essentially disappears while Wellington renders correctly.
This isn’t about cross-country standardization. I understand Spain and Ireland organize differently.
The problem is that NZ isn’t even consistent with itself. As you can see in the screenshot, the mighty Auckland has a speck in the middle, whereas Wellington shows at its correct size.
Re: “OSM data isn’t meant to be ready for consumption”
With respect, my post is helping make it ready - by identifying a specific inconsistency that can be fixed. If we accept “it’s messy, deal with it” as the answer, nothing improves.
The fix seems straightforward:
Either Auckland needs an admin_level=8 boundary representing the city (like Wellington has)
Or Wellington (and other cities) should be subdivided into wards at admin_level=8 (like Auckland is)
Currently the data implies Auckland doesn’t exist as a city at this level, while Wellington does. That’s not reflecting “real world complexity” - it’s just inconsistent data entry.
I’m happy to help fix this if someone can point me to the right boundary relations to edit.
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