Just as a bit more explanation, I was so specific about how the maritime boundary is located “where the IBC says it is” because this is distinctly different from any normal boundary survey. When a boundary is initially surveyed on land, the boundary is instead fixed by the physical monuments placed by the original surveyor, even if they where not placed when actually intended.

An example of this is the “Four Corners” of Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. It’s been said many times, in publications over the decades, that the actual monument is “in the wrong place”. This is because it is not, per later more accurate surveys, at the actual location “intended”… due to errors in the original survey, it is a few hundred meters away from the latitude and longitude where the surveyor was instructed to place the corner. Regardless of this, it is in the right place… the actual corner is where the surveyor placed it.

The same holds true for portions of the Canada-US boundary that are on land… the border is actually defined by the physical monuments themselves, as opposed to the published coordinates.

Because it’s broken? :P

Many of the US county boundaries that border the ocean were imported with the coastline as the boundary instead of the ‘real’ boundary…. in Texas (where I’m from) there are quite a fe cases of islands that are shown as ‘discontiguous sections’ of the county, even though the real boundary covers the water also…

Yea another thing to eventually fix. :/

Oh, and also re keys on the boundary ways…. I’ve noticed that the JOSM validator does not complain about things like roads accidentally linked to an admin boundary unless the keys are explicitly set on the way, which seems like a bit more compelling reason for doing it.

Re the boundary lines, I’m not just adding the keys just for the itoworld display, I was just using it as an indication of how many were missing. As ToeBee put it, to paraphrase, “It’ll prevent editors using feature-poor programs from thinking it’s just a random line”, lol. Thank you for that link, though, it’s much prettier, though it also seems to run off of a cache (I fixed some city lines for Midland Texas that were the wrong admin_level, and they are still shown as county lines). The main point, really, was not to just have completely untagged and unlabeled lines floating around that could accidentally go away, and so the counties wouldn’t break if the tag were accidentally taken off of the relation. It’s one of those things that, if it’s an issue somehow, doesn’t ‘have’ to be done AFAIK, and if it did cause an issue somewhere I could not do it.

Re admin_centre. On the county boundaries, I’m actually setting the ‘label’ role for the county node, and the ‘admin_centre’ role for the place node of the county seat, which from what I read is the intended way of doing it. I’m not messing with any of the cities yet, but I was aware they are supposed to work off just the “admin_centre” role.

Something else I just learned is that a place node (with a boundary relation) needs to NOT have an is_in field, as it sometimes breaks linking.

Having the tags on the ways also appears to be needed to make the itoworld admin boundary map work correctly, as it does not see the relations.

http://www.itoworld.com/map/2?lon=-99.51210&lat=31.25489&zoom=6&fullscreen=true&fullscreen=true

Note this works off a cached copy OSM (apparently) and doesn’t show recent fixes.