Currently, only administrative levels 4 (provinces) and 6 (districts) are covered. This import hopes to also include coverage for administrative level 8 (sub-districts). I think this is important to have in the OSM database, as the sub-district is an important component in Mongolian addressing. House numbers are allocated per sub-district and tied to that sub-district (as opposed to e.g. a street).
I’ll be splitting this into 2 changesets, one for updating levels 4 and 6, and one for adding level 8.
The dataset is not distributed under a specific license, but is subject to copyright. I have obtained explicit permission for redistribution through OSM (see wiki page for more details).
As this is my first import, and I’m working solo, I’ll be especially careful. I’m reading up on other imports to learn and coming up with a plan to conflate the data with the existing region boundaries. I’m known to pay meticulous attention to detail, and will think twice before hitting that upload button.
designation=* is an elegant way to distinguish between different administrative unit types at the same level. However, for better or worse, border_type=* is more common for this purpose and currently supported by the search function on the OSM website. Do you have a strong preference for designation=* over border_type=*? It probably wouldn’t be difficult to add support for it as well, but I’d need to check if Nominatim exposes that attribute to the website.
border_type=* is normally set to a keyword, so it follows the keyword tagging convention of snake_case in English rather than the local language. This makes it possible to translate the designation to every language that the website supports. In the case of Mongolia, сум could be district and дүүрэг could be municipal_district. The website already has translations for district but not for municipal_district. Or you could distinguish between sum and düüreg, but the website would need to specifically add support for translating both keywords.
I don’t have a strong preference myself, and while I think it is a good thing to have a somewhat universal identifier for administrative unit type, I would also like to have the official term in there somewhere as well, so I think it makes sense to also keep the designation=* tag in there.
I’ll add the following for the border_type=* tag, staying in line with the terminology used on Wikipedia:
аймаг → border_type=province
сум → border_type=district
дүүрэг → border_type=municipal_district
баг → border_type=subdistrict
хороо → border_type=municipal_subdistrict
I did also find several different English translations of the constitution of Mongolia, which sometimes simply use transliterated terms and sometimes ambiguous translation like region, group and division. I think the Wikipedia articles are closer to the actual meaning in the native language, so I’ll just go with those.
Yes, to be clear, the point of border_type=* is the same as designation=*. There’s no effort to make these into universal identifiers, only to make them more easily translatable. “District” means many things in different parts of the world and that’s OK. If you also prefer to tag the legal title in Mongolian, designation=* seems fine since nothing depends on it, though official_name=* would also be useful for searchability.