This user account has been created for the purpose of importing and updating the boundary data for the Regional Districts of British Columbia.

Boundary data is contained in a single layer, and comes from the British Columbia Data Distribution Service. The Province of British Columbia has made the boundary data available under its Open Government License v.bc1.0.

This data has been converted from the original shapefiles to GPX using GPS TrackMaker, and then to OSM format using GPSBabel. The resulting polygons were brought into JOSM, and then broken up into separate ways, each beginning and ending at a point where three Regional Districts meet. A few errors were found in the original data as obtained from DataBC, the most important being found at the boundary tripoints, such as cases where two Regional Districts met at a particular tripoint, but not the third. The errors only amounted to an offset of less than five centimetres, and were corrected, resulting in all tripoints having three Regional District boundaries exactly converging. Each way was simplified and tagged as follows:

• boundary = administrative
• admin_level = 6
• source = DataBC TANTALIS REG_DSTRCT

Each way was then tagged with two relations referring to the two Regional Districts separated by that way. Each relation is tagged as follows:

• type = boundary
• boundary = administrative
• admin_level = 6
• source = DataBC TANTALIS REG_DSTRCT
• name = « Legal name of Regional District »

For the Greater Vancouver Regional District relation, an extra tag was added:

• brand = Metro Vancouver

This was because the Greater Vancouver Regional District now refers to itself in public simply as “Metro Vancouver”.