Proposed mechanical edit to remove `is_in:suburb` from Australia

Communities Oceania
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1

I’m planning to bulk-delete all the deprecated is_in:suburb tags from Australia. Taginfo reports that nearly 30% (3983 of 13946) of the global uses of the key are in Australia, and almost all of those are in western Sydney. (I can’t open Vespucci in north-western Sydney without being inundated with deprecation warnings on every street way. :woozy_face:)

My understanding is that the various in_in:* tags were helpful before there was a way to properly define administrative boundaries. But since the admin boundary relations were added, these tags are redundant and sometimes incorrect. (Please correct me if I’ve misunderstood.)

So my main questions on this post are:

  1. Are there any objections to doing a bulk deletion of every is_in:suburb (and related alt_is_in:suburb) key within Australia?
  2. Should this be expanded outside Australia? I only have knowledge of Aus mapping so I can’t say if the tags are equally redundant in other areas of the world.
  3. Are there any other is_in-related tags that should also be removed? Taginfo reports many variants in use in Australia, and I’m not yet experienced enough with OSM to know which ones are still needed.
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2

Sound great. Can we also get rid of all the other variations of is_in?

3

Definitely support this.

I wouldn’t necessarily go outside of Australia without knowing what state each country’s addr:suburb or admin boundary tagging is in.

4

The proposal is only for Australia.

5

There’s a mention of expanding this outside Australia in the post (question 2).

6

Yep, go for it, & if/when it works as expected, tell everybody else about it, so they can copy the concept as required!

From that TI list, I don’t think there’s anything that needs to be kept?

7

For a proper answer to this, you’d want to start a separate thread in the relevant regional category or a global category. is_in and its subkeys are no longer favored for their original use, but some of the subkeys may have found niche uses in some regions that aren’t as straightforward to remove outright.

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8

Good point. In that case no.

9

I can’t see anything in the list that needs to be kept.

10

I’m happy to also remove the other is_in variations if that’s agreed. My plan is mostly to load up Overpass queries in JOSM and delete the key(s) from the specific objects — I could do one changeset per tag just in case one of them needs to be reverted?

is_in:farm is one that intrigues me though — I’m not sure that detail would always be covered by other boundaries, but I’m also not sure of the validity of the data.

11

The top 10 uses of is_in:farm is on public roads. I’d argue that this really isn’t in a farm.

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12

There are only 20 instances of is_in:farm that are not a named road: overpass turbo (These are all highway=*). Some of the random ones I checked in NSW don’t line up with the cadastre, so I’m not sure that they are valid.

13

Thanks for your feedback everyone. I’ve just finished removing all the is_in-related tags from Australia.
Changeset links and tag counts are listed here: Automated edits/Gillifrey/Remove "is in" tags from Australia - OpenStreetMap Wiki

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