I created an Area/Boundary that details the limits of a Parish in the year 1965. See OpenStreetMap
When I open a map and search for “Ferdinand” (which is the name of the parish cuhurch) that “way” is found but if I click on it instead of showing an unfilled parish boundary it shows a filled polygon.
Is there a way to define that boundary so on the map it is visible to random users and it shows as a boundary, not as a filled polygon?
Sorry for my newbie question - I have scoured the help and I’m either to dumb or this is too complex…
Hello and welcome to the forum.
You have not in fact created a boundary but a residential area. By definition this is an area, not just a boundary, so displaying as a polygon makes sense. It in effect means “the land in this area is used mainly for housing and related purposes”.
I am fairly sure you didn’t intend to create a residential landuse area. You would need some kind of boundary tag as described at this page.
If this is a current religious parish (i.e. not part of the civil administrative structure, although I know the word parish also has a civil meaning in some places), then boundary=religious_administration might work, although I would check how similar things are mapped in your region.
If this is not longer a current parish, the advice to check similar mapping in your region applies even more strongly. Some countries don´t like to map purely historic boundaries at all, others do so but with special tagging.
If by “visible to random users” you mean that it will appear on the standard map on openstreetmap.org, that is not going to happen if this is a purely religious boundary, even if it is current. That is a general-purpose map and does not display everything in the map data. Religious boundaries are not displayed, although they may be searchable by name, and can be found by other tools.
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If it’s boundary from 1965 and no longer correct then it should be mapped in OpenHistoricalMap. Is this boundary visible anywhere on the ground? Marked with signs etc.
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Indeed I should have mentioned in my first answer that depending on what you are trying to achieve, https://www.openhistoricalmap.org might be closer to what you need than openstreetmap.org.
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Thank you folks for the quick replies!
Yes this boundary no longer applies. Various parishes have merged etc. so it is greatly expanded now. Which is why when I named it I explicitly stated it is a 1965 boundary. Now that I have been educated on their being a openhistoricalmap.org can you please give me pointers on if I can somehow “change” what I did (hours of work) into the proper boundary type instead of a residential area and then move this over to the historical site?
Or do I need to completely start over on the historical site?
Thanks again! Super helpful.
No it is not visible in the physical world.
I added the boundary tag as you suggested, making it of religious_administration as well. And changed the Type from residential area to religious area.
It still shows a filled polygon.
I assume I have to create the boundary using lines instead of an area and do so onthe historical site.
It is now mapped with landuse=religious, implying the entire area is used for religious purposes, like church grounds. There shouldn’t be any landuse tag here. Note that OSM doesn’t really have a distinction between drawing “area” versus a “perimeter” - it is the tags that determine the meaning, and landuse tags apply to the whole enclosed area.
But removing landuse won’t change the fact that it is now tagged as a current boundary. Indicating otherwise in the name isn’t enough. Consider someone who wants to make a map of current parish boundaries over a wide area from OSM data - they can’t read every name to see if the data is current or not, so would wrongly map this as if it is a present day boundary.
It might be worth thinking about your overall aim, e.g. are you going to be mapping a lot of these. OpenHistoryMap has already been suggested, but if you just want to display some limited historic data, another option might be to use a service that allows you to overlay your own data on top of an OSM background, without including it in the public OSM database.
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I have requested the feature to be deleted from openstreetmaps.org and I have added the proper line boundary to openhistoricalmaps.org. Thank you everyone for the help.