Can you be more specific? 'ele=f' is not a valid tag as far as I know.

Hello,

No particular reason for 'dispute' over 'disputed'. The overall tag usage is fairly evenly split between them among the features I track, although 'disputed' is slightly more common. When I was actively working with these features, I just filtered for either tag so I don't have a preference either way really. Its certainly an inconsistency in the data that might be worth bulk updating some day.

Totally agree that boundary=disputed should be the tag for those segments. I should have made that fix when I added the dispute tag back.

In any case, I've now updated the boundary type and changed the tag to disputed.

Thanks for flagging this!
-Jeff

Hi zstadler,

In the interest of avoiding conflict I'll just pull out that relation for now.

-Jeff

Hi zstadler,

Forgive me if I’m mistaken as I’m not an expert on the conflict, but the DMZ line seems to correspond to the 1923 border which appears to be the last mutually agreed border while everything since has been enforced or de facto borders. So while this may not be an active claim by the disputants, in my opinion there is still validity to keeping it until a newer agreement supersedes it. Most other mapping platforms out there still render this DMZ line which at least adds some credibility to the claim that it is still relevant.

I totally appreciate that OSM is not the place to legislate conflicts and that is not the purpose of any of this mapping. This is a politically neutral project to map disputes as completely as possible in order to allow OSM administrative borders to be more flexible for downstream users where “on the ground” borders may not be desirable or even legal to display within a locality.

-Jeff

Hello zstadler and BodhidharmaI

Thanks for reaching out. I believe I’ve covered most of what you asked below. Let me know if you still have more questions. Disputed borders are complicated to map and tricky to visualize using typical OSM tooling unfortunately.

To preface, this is the tagging schema in general. For rendering purposes, consider a claimed_by or recognized_by tag to mean this is a solid border for those viewpoints, while a disputed_by tag means this border should not render at all for those viewpoints. Lastly, for the remaining viewpoints that are not specifically tagged one way or the other, a dashed line showing that this border is in dispute will be shown.

For the DMZ, none of the main parties currently claim it as their border, but it is one possible border with some historical precedent. So for rendering here, the intent is for uninvolved viewpoints to see it as a dashed line showing it as one of several possible borders. Since none of the main disputants claim this particular line, it is only marked with disputed_by tags in order to hide it for them as generally claimants should only see the one “correct” border for their viewpoint.

Here are direct answers to your questions as well BodhidharmaI

1. It means this is not considered a correct or possible border by the marked countries. The tag itself means do not render for those iso codes
2. Yes, this is not considered a valid border by the marked countries
3. Israel does not recognize this as a legitimate border
4. Yes, the countries marked believe the borders lie elsewhere and their viewpoints should be covered by other claims in the area.

Hello zstadler,

It sounds like the source on Natural Earth is generally from Palestine not recognizing Israel therefore not recognizing its province boundaries.

Regardless, to avoid further controversy on this particular relation, I've deleted it as you are not the first to be skeptical of it.

Appreciate you reaching out!
Jeff

Hi zsadler,

This is an uncommon sort of dispute, where a country does not recognize another's provinces or believes them to be of a different classification. In this case, it is marking that Palestine does not view Israel's province boundaries as admin_level=4. The purpose of the relation is allow for country specific views of boundaries while still using just OSM data.

This and all the other disputes I mapped recently are being pulled from the Natural Earth dataset if you are curious on the source.

I think the name I gave was overly vague and dispute can be a charged word. Maybe something like "External Viewpoints on Administrative Boundary Levels" would be a little more clear and neutral sounding. What do you think?

Happy to chat more if you have additional concerns or questions as well.

-Jeff

Hello OrDal,

I appreciate you taking the time to reply.

1. In some cases, the dispute names may be somewhat imprecise and are there to just help clarify what they represent. Some borders or claims are recognized by other countries while the “claimant” themselves has undefined or broader claims themselves.
2. Border disputes are almost always cases such as this. Although some are active conflict zones, the majority are simply stated disagreements over a territory. In this case, Syria still claims the territory and many countries of the world still recognize it as occupied territory. The relation is not adding legitimacy to the claim, instead, trying to reflect the complex reality of the world.
3. These sorts of relations are admittedly a little weird looking. In this case, it is Palestine not acknowledging the districts of Israel. Instead, the relation marks them as admin_level=8 for Palestine specifically to lower their prominence. The other countries are defined explicitly as still having admin_level=4 just for completeness.

User nvk has two great diaries detailing this work that you may find interesting here
@nvk/diary/390496

Wikipedia documents these disputes of course, but it is not a geographic database. OpenStreetMap is increasingly the primary datasource for the world’s maps and having complete administrative data is a pretty important part of that. “On the ground” is a good policy for mapping country borders, but the laws and expectations of various countries make this not a complete solution for downstream users. Dispute relations can fill in this gap while being unobtrusive and invisible to the majority of users.

Our main source for mapping these is the free datasource Natural Earth which you can peruse here if you are interested. It is a collaborative effort and the disputes are still pretty new so if you see issues or mistakes you can report them to the GitHub for corrections. NE is a low resolution datasource that is meant for big picture maps, while this mapping project helps to create OSM data that can take over for high resolution maps.

https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cultural-vectors/10m-admin-0-breakaway-disputed-areas/

-Jeff

Hello OrDal,

These relations mark lines of contention that exist in the real world. The intent is not to make judgement on the validity of any particular claim, dispute, or reference line, only to accurately document them. Additionally, these relations will not affect anything as far as rendering goes unless a data consumer actively builds support for them.

I'm happy to chat about these with you further as I understand these can be very sensitive, in the meantime I'm going to restore them though.

-Jeff

Just an update that I have moved the tags onto a relation in both Israel and Palestine now.

Thanks for your patience and feedback!
-Jeff

Hello, sorry I forgot to update the source. These edits are based on disputed borders contained in the Natural Earth dataset. Province level admin level viewpoints are part of the admin 1 dataset here.

https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cultural-vectors/10m-admin-1-states-provinces/

Nvk's diary posts here help explain the tagging and rationale behind the edits. @nvk/diary

Essentially, these tags are to allow downstream users to display borders in different ways depending on the localities being served in OSM based maps.

I totally understand that these are sensitive edits and am happy to discuss them further.

-Jeff

Hey ivanbranco,

You are totally right. I missed it somehow when I was looking for an existing feature to attach to the relation. I removed my duplicate and add the existing one to the relation instead.

Thanks for the heads up
Jeff

Hey user_5359,

Just want to give an update that I'm looking into how best to move these onto a relation and will get back to you soon.

-Jeff

Hello Supaplex,

This is tagging related to disputed borders. These admin_level:iso_code tags allow for ways to be reclassified for certain country views in downstream maps. nvk has a good diary detailing the use case here @nvk/diary/390496.

This is definitely sensitive work and no offense is meant by adding them. I'm happy to have a dialogue on how best to represent these that would be acceptable to the OSM Taiwan community.

-Jeff

Oh totally, just cleaned it up. Sorry about that.

I had some NE ways in JOSM to help with the digitization and missed cleaning up one of them.

Hello again!

Currently, our map renderer expects these tags on ways. Is there any particular concern with them remaining there? They will not affect any rendering on the OSM website or any downstream map that doesn't specifically choose to use them.

Totally open to dialogue on this so hope to hear your thoughts :)

-Jeff

Hi highflyer74,

These admin_level:iso_code tags are used specifically to redefine boundaries to alternate levels such as a country border being defined as a state border instead. nvk's diary here shows a good example of the use case using India, Pakistan, and China here. @nvk/diary/390496

mueschel was pointing out that I used lower case iso codes by mistake which has now been fixed, but the tags themselves do serve a purpose.

Happy to continue discussing these edits if you have more questions or concerns about them. :)

-Jeff

Yeah go for it. The current names for the disputes are not necessarily the best names.

Hey mueschel,

Good call. I just cleaned that up. Thanks for letting me know!

-Jeff

Hello!

I fixed the lower case typo. Thanks for pointing it out.

-Jeff