Someone has labeled Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire as the country of the Netherlands.
In fact, although they are part of the kingdom of the Netherlands, each is an independent country.
How can this be corrected as it is showing improperly in all maps using openstreetmap.
I’m sorry if this is not the right place to post this.
Thanks!
John
They look labelled correctly, as constituent countries within the kingdom. What exactly do you think is wrong?
Part of Kingdom of the Netherlands
They are not. They depend on the kingdom’s navy and marines for all military tasks. Also, the king formally appoints the island’s governor.
Yes, fully agree that the governor is appointed by the Netherlands just as in Canada the Governor General represents the queen of England.
However, when you select Montreal on a map, it doesn’t say: Montreal, England.
When a city in Aruba is selected, it shows as Eagle Beach, Netherlands as opposed to Eagle Beach, Aruba.
Thanks for responding!
There is no queen of England; she is the queen of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Since 1982 all constitutional ties between the UK and Canada haven been cut. Canada is as an example not a (pre-Brexit) EC member.
This is not the case for the ABC island in relation to the Netherlands.
Ok, maybe that was a bad example on my part.
But Aruba is a country.
And as in Canada, although the governor is appointed, the prime minister is elected.
Wikipedia:
Aruba is one of the four countries that form the Kingdom of the Netherlands, along with the Netherlands, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten; the citizens of these countries are all Dutch nationals. Aruba has no administrative subdivisions, but, for census purposes, is divided into eight regions. Its capital is Oranjestad.
In which software? Carto-OSM (the default renderer on openstreetmap.org) shows me a beach:
Beach Eagle Beach, J.E. Irausquin Boulevard, Bushiri, Punta Brabo, Aruba, 000001, Netherlands
And Geonames gives:
Eagle Beach , Aruba
Neither are particularly wrong, although it is debatable whether or not the kingdom relation should have the full name Kingdom of the Netherlands rather than just Netherlands.
The Geonames “Eagle Beach, Aruba” is showing it the way it is referred to here in the country and in government documents.
Local government documents never refer to it as the Netherlands.
Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing Maps etc… all refer to it that way.
But Aruba is part of (the kingdom of) the Netherlands. Just as Wales is part of the United Kingdom. For example, the town Llanfairpwllgwyngyll in Wales:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, Isle of Anglesey, Wales, LL61, United Kingdom
Aruba is not a sovereign state (neither are Sint Maarten and Curaçao), it is a dependant territory, so the proper hierarchy of names doesn’t stop at Aruba.
It does look strange that it says Netherlands instead of Kingdom of the Netherlands, but I fear that is a convention of using short names rather than formal ones for sovereign states.
That means they might have a bug. 
Where it gets confusing is when in some applications it shows just the city and then the last part as in: Eagle Beach, Netherlands.
Did you file a bug with those applications? If they do that for cities worldwide (e.g., the US, where leaving out the state means you will get a lot of duplicates) then their search results will invariably be ambiguous.
I think the Kingdom of the Netherlands should be deleted as a relation and the constituent members (e. g. Netherlands, Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire) bumped to AL2. This is how we deal with e. g. Isle of Man or the Channel Islands: they’re possessions of the British Crown and not independent countries, but they do not belong to the United Kingdom. The Kingdom of the Netherlands, despite having “Kingdom” in its name, is comparable to the British Crown: it’s not a country in its own right.
This is still wrong. When you mail something, you do not add Netherlands as the country, you add Aruba as the country. I’m pretty sure this is also the case for Scotland and Wales.
Also, by the definition of constituent country, Greenland and The Faroe Islands, also should not be countries, but they are listed as countries on OSM, and I’m sure a whole bunch of other cases where this is the case as well.
Niue is considered to be a country even though its sovereignty belongs to New Zealand.
Also, all of these territories of the UK and crown dependencies are listed as countries.
The United Kingdom has the following 13 overseas territories and one claimed Antarctic dependent territory
The British monarch also has direct sovereignty over three self-governing Crown Dependencies: Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey
So please make the correction and don’t be biased against some islands and not others.
EDIT:
Also, for comparison, since 2010, Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba, which were previously part of The Netherlands Antilles have become special municipalities of The Netherlands, for which they do get to be dutch states, but Curacao and Sint Maarten in 2010 have also become autonomous countries, similar to Aruba
Just in case it could be interesting, here are a couple of pictures from last years Miss Labeled Country competition:
If you are sending something from outside the UK, you may write Wales,
Scotland, Northern Ireland or England but you could equally write
United Kingdom (or Royaume-Uni as I have done on postcards).
Inside the UK its just housenumber, street, town and postcode. The
constituent countries are not part of the address.
In the case of the United Kingdom, what should we fix?
Yet, Denkmark is listed as a country and all other islands I mentioned, but Aruba is not.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if you put The Netherlands as country on a postcard to be sent to Aruba.
I wouldn’t know, but the European Union is also a union of countries, yet they are all independent countries. I know the European Union is technically a bit different as it is an economic union, but it does list the members as states (whatever that means)
It clearly states that The Netherlands is a constituent country (same as Aruba) of Kingdom of the Netherlands, yet The Netherlands is a country and Aruba is not. On top of that, in OSM, Aruba is a subarea of The Netherlands, which again, it is not.
The Netherlands and Aruba are both mapped as sub areas at admin level 3 of the (Kingdom of) the Netherlands at level 2. The descriptions and wiki links on the level 2 relation make clear that it is intended as The Kingdom of the Netherlands, however most name tags don’t make that clear.
Is the problem here about the name of the Kingdom relation at level 2, or or is there a structural problem beyond the name?
In OSM there currently are in fact four countries with a place=country node at admin_level=3, subordinate to the Kingdom at admin_level=2. However the Kingdom is tagged with common name=Netherlands which may cause confusion. Aruba is not inside the Netherlands (country), but it is inside the Netherlands (Kingdom). If you render official_name you can see what’s going on.
See the wiki for documentation:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands
It is not trivial to compare the Kingdom of the Netherlands with e.g. the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Denmark, or France, as each setup has evolved in a unique way. Aruba is certainly part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and subject to a federal government with federal legislation. I believe the Crown Dependencies are in fact more independent, and are traditionally considered to be outside the United Kingdom.
Not every boundary=administrative is part of postal addresses and not every part of postal addresses is boundary=administrative. The Caribbean Netherlands are also a country as far as postal addresses are concerned.
