Background

In 2023, New Brunswick (Canada) underwent a province-wide restructuring of their municipal boundaries. This consisted of 77 Incorporated Municipalities and 12 Unincorporated Rural Districts. Between 2023 and 2025, only a small handful of these boundaries were actually imported into OSM. Thus, I took it upon myself to begin what was my largest project ever, a full import of the updated boundaries across the province.

I saw it fit to write up a post summarizing the work that was done, along with some of the rationales for certain tagging methods used in this project, in order to maintain consistency both now and into the future. It should be noted that this was not an automated import, every kilometer of boundary was manually reviewed. The data used was from GeoNB, under the Open Government License – New Brunswick.

Pre-Import Phase/Admin Level Restructuring

When I started this project, New Brunswick’s existing boundary data was a complete mess, some larger cities had admin_level=6 boundaries, while other incorporated municipalities were tagged admin_level=8, and parishes were sharing admin_level=6, leading to overlaps. For instance, Saint-François Parish and Haut-Madawaska were both tagged admin_level=6, despite them occupying the same geographical area.

To fix this problem, I decided to shift all Parish boundaries to admin_level=8, and assign admin_level=6 to all municipal boundaries. The new admin level hierarchy is logical because Parishes are not incorporated government entities and have no modern-day purpose. Furthermore, it more closely resembles data in other provinces in Canada (such as Alberta, Quebec, and Nova Scotia), which prioritize admin_level=6 for municipal districts. Both the New Brunswick wiki as well as the Canada admin level wiki pages were updated to reflect these changes.

Below are some examples of the admin_level tagging schema before and after my updates:

Example 1 [Before]:

… See full entry

This is a bit of an experiment on how to use this Diary

9 September 2024

• I just moved to Brooks, Alberta from Calgary,
• After glancing at the ResultMaps page it seems like I might be the only active contributor in the area of Brooks/Newell County so that’s partly scary and partly exciting, as there’s still a lot of work to be done.
• My first order of business will probably be figuring out why half the roads in town use an abbreviated “W” or “E” suffix as opposed to using the full word spelled out. I’ll have to work on standardizing that, although I’ll have to do some sleuthing to figure out the correct format for those.
• I’m sure there will also be a lot of work to be done in terms of speed limits, sidewalks, stop signs, and other features that could be useful for navigation software.
• Perhaps I’ll come back and do some editing in Calgary from time to time as well, particularly in the Taza Park area which continues to make steady construction progress.
• I’m a busy man but love contributing to osm and hope to make some progress over the next couple of years. Thanks for reading my first diary entry~~!