I am nodding my head to much or all of this, Minh. I see your point of “not so fast,” though this seems like the answer is “both.” A bit like how Alaska’s Unorganized Borough has census boundaries that act as de facto subdivisions as mutually-agreed between the Bureau and state. (Rough and loose analogy, as “everywhere everything is different,” but in some cases like this, loose analogies can be made). Then we are smacked in the face with the reality that if these are tagged boundary=* a choice must be made between a value of census and say (again, I’m spitballing) local_council or third_division.
Your sign idea has had and does have great merit (in all the places, and there are many, where it applies), though a contrapositive (I think that’s right) of “no sign means no subdivision” isn’t a proof of non-existence. We have no dispute these entities exist, what I’m saying is I think we need a new syntax to denote them something distinct from admin_level=*, untangling from that. Again, lessons learned (and maybe even a different, to stay unconfused, numerical denotation might work) from that tag are nutritious here. I’m tossing out a couple darts on the dartboard of initial ideas to move things forward.
We can invent / develop such tagging / syntax without such signs, though I certainly appreciate you looking for them. Now, what should we call these / how might we tag them? The obvious answer to name them as they are in the local language is an important consideration, but then we have a similar tarball that admin_level=* has, so structures like “first division, second division…” and/or starting with local/regional(/sub?)national (like for biking, hiking, equestrian, etc. routes…) and things can begin to unfold as they naturally will. This is a bit of “paving the road and immediately driving upon it” sort of tag development, which makes it potentially fraught with difficulty (of liquidity, of “everything being molten”) but that’s simply what this is. OSM is really organic like this.
We made great strides here just in the last few days regarding similar entities in Maine and a couple other New England states regarding admin_level=8 tagging. We can do this.
That’s complex, although I think the sorts of (native, aboriginal, other, particularly-rendered, checkbox-enabled-from-a-browser, user-selectable-on-a-GUI) tagging strategies OSM now uses can “handle it.”
So, yes, as “us” is both “US” and “Australia” and really, humans.
Paul (and wider community), what think you of values for a new key of something like first_division, second_division, third_division...? (where the latter could attribute a Navajo Chapter House, if indeed that is a correct level). We’re using nesting subordinations, and even numbers (ordinals, not cardinals), but (British English) text-based methods to do so (a la Wikipedia’s and vernacular “levels”). Again, we’re totally chewing some brand-new gum here, and seeing if we could blow bubbles; very “try things on first.”
And, “usual” tagging for “local” language(s) and renderer / GUI support (to “turn on” selectable languages, like in Americana) and it’s starting to gel.
The situation is complex with varying revendications and traities, agreements by country and province/state and indigenous nations/local communities. As we saw in previouis discussions on talk-ca, Sensivities might vary about this, but I myself think that we should be carefull to move away from errors of the past especially in the way of representing in OSM indigenous nations and their territories.
I will talk here of the areas I know better, but the situation varies in Canada from one province to the other.The population of the large Nunavut territory, north of Canada, is mostly inuit with their own territorial government with a status similar to provinces.
There are conjoint agreements between Québec/Federal government and local communities for the northern regions of Québec for regional assemblies with some conjoint responsabilities of indigenous-non-indigenous communities in the management of the large territoy similar to a sub-region. There are also the local indigenous communities territories that correspond to municipalities (possesses land), and often a large determined territory around it with various specific rights of acccess to ressources for the local communities (fishing, hunting and some economic activities).
For the local indigenous communities territories in Canada with boundary=aboriginal_lands, I kept the admin_level tag and did proposed and added for Québec tags based on definitions used by the federal government
indigenous_group - first_nation, inuit
indigenous_nation - name of nation as listed in Governement website
indigenous_community - name of the local community (corresponds to their village)
See example Relation: Lac-Simon (7526846) | OpenStreetMap
Note that communities for a same nation to not often share a same larger territory, with communities contiguous to each other.
For the territories in Canada with a Reservation status to access of resources by local communities as defined by the federal governent, I did proposed and used the tag
Thanks for all these details. There probably are some commonalities between the U.S. and Canada that we’ll need to consider for defining any globally-applicable tag. Apart from the distinctions between types of indigenous areas in Canada, are you aware of any reserves that have their own internal boundaries within the reserve? If so, do these boundaries geographically correspond to anything in the non-indigenous administrative hierarchy, or are they determined by the indigenous groups as an internal affair? Do they coexist with any non-indigenous boundaries that cut right through the reserve?
Outstanding questions, Minh. After a brief scan of the open.canada index.html, I agree with @PierZen that this is “complex.” I myself do not begin to know it well. (Still, “we can tag it our best”). “Gentle improvement” can work.
Community lands correspond in general to the size of a village. The Land reservations are often large territories where local first nation communities have specific rigths reserved for ressources of the territory. There are no internal boundaries that I know for Quebec and cannot tell for other provinces.
boundary=aboriginal_lands is not applicable to Australia (nor NZ as far as I am aware). For more details see the discussion on the subject on the talk-au mail list.
There appear to be two conflating issues that complicate this greatly, the first of which I think is well within control of OSM:
admin_level=* is deemed inappropriate for use with boundary=aboriginal_lands by many because it’s “meant” to be used with boundary=administrative exclusively, and indeed that is its only common and well-documented use.
boundary=aboriginal_lands means all sorts of things, not just a political or administrative boundary.
With respect to 1), I don’t see why you couldn’t use admin_level=* with a separate and distinct nomenclature for aboriginal_lands, other than that it’s already overwhelmingly used only with administrative boundaries and you may have data consumers who aren’t looking for the boundary=* tag at all before deciding to render dashed lines anywhere they see admin_level=*.
With respect to 2), I’m not sure we’ll ever have nomenclature that sufficiently captures all the variations in use cases that I think are perfectly reasonable and justifiable for boundary=aboriginal_lands. Federal Indian reservations (Indian reserves in Canada) is the most obvious and common, but these reservations aren’t necessarily of the same level of administrative importance or at the same level in a hypothetical “admin level” hierarchy. Some reservations are occupied and administered jointly by multiple tribes/bands/etc., some have administrative subdivisions, some have separate governing councils for towns/villages within the boundary of the reservation, etc. And then you have off-reservation trust lands, state-recognized (but not federally-recognized) reservations…
While the difficulties associated with this topic / these topics are certainly made visible and vivid with this discussion, I heartily encourage its continuance. While OSM might not be able to promote “world peace” with regard to how we tag such data structures in our project, I continue to believe that we can continue to do this with more accuracy and harmony.
For example, how @PierZen has tagged Lac-Simon (with indigenous_community=Simosagigan, indigenous_group=first_nation, indigenous_nation=Anishinaabe (Algonquin)) shows that region-specific tagging (clearly underway here) that is both well-structured and documented can go a long way towards accurately denoting the specific semantics.
However, I do not find wiki entries for the indigenous_* entries, and while they would be specific to certain regions in North America / Canada / Nunavut for these values, they might also work in Australia (though, maybe not) and/or USA or other regions. It would clearly depend on the values chosen for such keys, and/or indeed even new (but similar) keys being invented for specific circumstances.
Clearly, OSM needs to continue working on this (and it appears to be a “tip of an iceberg” symptom of other potential tagging difficulties in these areas, but “the whole iceberg” is solvable, in my opinion). However, some progress can be seen in spite of our “continuing frustration at past botching of this,” so it is clearly a mixed bag of success (with some continuing failure, despite my dislike of that word in this context). While I encourage continuing efforts, even right here in this thread, the entire topic would greatly benefit from a worldwide (Australia, Canada, USA, Central and South American, African, Asian indigenous peoples, and more…) approach to how OSM can accurately and sensitively map these entities. Something like a longer-term working group, at least.
My impression is that “data consumers” in a formal sense don’t look assume that a secondary key like admin_level implies a primary tag like boundary=administrative, regardless of the terminology. However, in some sense, “data consumers” also includes one-off Overpass queries and Osmium extracts; those are more likely to make this kind of assumption, but the impact is much less severe and can be corrected easily.
The main downside I see is that intentional admin_level=* tags on non-administrative boundaries would be difficult to distinguish from run-of-the-mill tagging errors, such as retagging a CDP boundary as boundary=census without removing the inapplicable admin_level=* at the same time. I don’t think admin_level=* on boundary=aboriginal_lands is far-fetched if we want to assert that an indigenous boundary is administrative in nature, but it becomes more difficult to interpret if we also apply a different numeric scale when the key is used in this context.
There is a certain genius in the simplicity of these extant tags (in the hundreds) which have emerged as they have.
Still, if I were to see a one-line, one-section entry in our wiki for these tags (key-value pairs), I think such sharing widely would be celebrated globally.
That practice trivializes tribal government boundaries. All administrative areas should be treated same no matter the government source.
The aboriginal designation should be only applied to areas with cultural or similar significance. Crossing administrative boundaries as its location likely nothing to do with the local government structure. The actual boundaries could also be codified as a treaty or other long stand agreement without being considered political in nature.