Hah! Yeah, I think currently in Northern Ireland, once planning permission is granted, you typically have 5 years to start building, before it expires. So if people don't have the funds available, a common trick is to build foundations. You'd particularly see this with farming families who already own land and want to secure a plot of for one of their children to have a house on.

Hi - been a while since I was down that way, so I forget what I was thinking at the time - but looking at it with the imagery available today, it looks like a site where someone has put down foundations in order to avoid their planning permission expiring (and NMDDC have allocated it an address), but the house hasn't been built yet. The other two things showing on the satellite imagery actually look like parked lorries/containers to me, rather than buildings.

Yeah I have tagged half a dozen or more Ulsterbus routes that now operate from Grand Central Station - Translink's own app (which uses OSM mapping!) is a dog's dinner at that area, their routing algorithm is all over the place. One tagging decision I made was to simply show all the busses using one 'bus stop', rather than to try and tag them on particular bus stands (as in my experience these change frequently, as drivers don't always pull up in the right stand anyways!)

Hi LateNightTone - great to get more accuracy in the Grand Central Station layout, but your edit seems to have broken the relations of a few bus routes (215, 216, ...) - the OSM Inspector validator is complaining (see https://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/ ) - could you check? I think maybe you just need to remove tagging on one of the ways you extended?

I would not relish manually retagging all that in ID though :)

It would probably be less problematic just to have Ulster Way as a separate relation, rather than a parent of all the segments. And so a bit of the Newry Canal Way which was also part of the Ulster Way would have a tag for each.

*nest them.

However the snag is that several of the component segments have extra waymarked bits which aren't part of the Ulster Way. Hence things like the Newry Canal Way and the Lecale Way have ended up as a pair of relations, one with the suffix "(Ulster Way section)" and the other not. But these are quite prone to tagging errors and circular nesting....

There's a bit of a nesting problem with these: originally (1970s) the Ulster Way was a continuous waymarked hiking route the whole way round Northern Ireland. But it kinda fell to bits, and in the 'noughties, they rejigged it as a series of a dozen or so disconnected off-road hiking routes (such as the Newry Way), which all have the same waymarker symbols). Several years ago, someone make the fairly reasonable decision to make relations for the dozen or so segments, and net them under an overall Ulster Way relation...

OSM Inspector seems happy today! Thanks for fixing it :)

Hi LateNightTone - I spotted that bus route validator at https://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/ is currently complaining that Ulsterbus route 109a (Lisburn - BFS airport - Antrim) isn't PTv2 compliant any more - looking at the change history, possibly one of your edits has perturbed the relation. Could you check?

Well fair enough if there was another nearby node with similar tagging. I agree the razed/abandoned/disused tagging is a bit woolly at times - although often with those old rural rail lines in NI, although the track itself is gone, it is still crystal clear on the ground that it's an abandoned railway, cos the corridor is still there with field boundaries and hedges untouched.

(Meanwhile, in terms of administrative boundaries, there are already are accurate boundary relations for Newry, Mourne & Down District Council, and the 'DEAs' and wards that it is divided into.)

Yeah I decided to remove the 'place=city' relation, and use the node to designate the city. (Previously the node was being use as 'label' in the relation.) The OSM wiki's guidance is not dogmatic on the issue, but I felt the boundary relation had just been drawn empirically as a 'residential' area, using the satellite imagery, and it didn't correspond to any actual legal/administrative boundaries (either electorally or for local government). So I just left it purely as a (residential) land-use designation.
Maybe Nominatum needs a day or two to refresh its cache, or however it works?

Hmm, well what is the correct way to tag a disused railway station building, then?
For instance your changeset has left the former Ardglass Railway Station building ( way/983112658 ) just as a building incongruously tagged 'name=Ardglass', which makes no sense.

I don't it pays to think too deeply these things - OSM tags try to be logical and consistent, and people try to put a bit of helpful guidance on the OSM wiki, but they will never be 100% accurate and applicable to every place on the planet - there's just too much complexity and fiddly differences out there! :)
Where you live, I guess your main official administrative unit is indeed F&ODC. But there's plenty of things where it isn't (e.g. the Health & Social Care boards are split up entirely differently, as are our Stormont and Westminster election constituencies).
As we know, Royal Mail have their own official system for forming postal addresses, but that is just for the purposes of getting letter delivered.
On broad balance, my vote to tag NI counties with 'place=county' but also 'boundary=historic' - I think that best captures the current situation, in as much as the generally understood meanings of those tags goes. If 'Nominatum' gets bamboozled by that, they that is a problem for Nominatum to sort out - every country in the world has different nuance in its postal addresses, Nominatum should be able to cope with that.

None of the above is in any way an attempt to declare than County Fermanagh (or Down, Antrim, Armagh, Tyrone or Derrylondon) do not 'exist' or 'matter' - they are counties and should be tagged as such, and are still by far and away they most widely known and recognised georgraphic divisions in Ireland.

The examples you give are all administrative functions, yes. Another one is 'Lieutenacy Areas' (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieutenancy_area) - the current Lord Lieutenant of Fermanagh is Alan Brooke, the 3rd Viscount of Brookeborough (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Brooke,_3rd_Viscount_Brookeborough) which I'm sure is an extremely important job and King Charles III simply couldn't manage without him, although what he actually does all day escapes me for the minute :)

However County Fermanagh is not involved as an administrative unit in a lot of rather more mundane administrative functions such as:
- emptying bins
- running public libraries
- running the NHS
- paying your rates
- running fire brigades
- fixing the roads
- blah blah blah
(Such matters are attended to by district councils or fancy fellows in Stormont).

On the balance of consideration, about 95% of civil and municial administration does NOT use County Fermanagh.
Hence the 'historic' add seems fine to me, as a general rule of thumb.

Mister MCDA, I think 'boundary=historic' is indeed an appropriate tag. The boundaries in question were defined in 1898 (in the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898, to be precise). And as we know, they're not used for local government any more. So they are the kind of thing that 'boundary=historic' is used for.

I think this change was misguided and should be reverted.
Counties Down, Antrim, Armagh, Fermanagh, Derrylondon & Tyrone are most definitely counties, and should remain tagged as such, 'place=county'.
It is true that (since 1972) they are little used for administrative purposes (not for voting or collecting bins or organising fire brigades or in official Royal Mail postal addresses** or etc etc*) - hence the 'historic' tag. But they are very much still known and used by the people who live in them, in what I guess we might call a 'geographical' sense, simply as places.
I don't really know much about 'Nominatum', but if it is outputting things like 'Enniskillen is in County Fermanagh' or 'Milisle is in County Down' these are perfectly sensible, useful and correct things to say.

*one thing they are still used for is 'Lord Lieutenancies' for the UK monarchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieutenancy_area

**adding a NI county to a postal address is not Royal Mail's official way to do things, but is not uncommon, and is never going to result in a letter or parcel going to the wrong place. Putting the current NI district council names in postal addresses is pretty NEVER done by anyone and Nominatum should certainly not be doing it!
Another geocoding faux-pas is to add to mistakenly add the county of an addresses *Post Town* to an address - for example, many County Down addresses outside Belfast have 'BELFAST' for their post town - and it is very incorrect to instead put their address as 'BELFAST, County Antrim'.

that lane is a 'public right of way' for pedestrians, I guess that means its 'private' for motor vehicles - let me check...