> In some cases borders may overlap without making it an incorrect tagging. It may be result of agreement between countries to administer area together or to mark areas not controlled by any country, with both claiming it.
Fun fact: when you think of boundary disputes, two things tend to be assumed. One, this only happens in 'certain' countries. Two, this always means more than one country claims the same piece of land.
As for two: because of complex reasons to with their eventual bullshit bargaining position, there are several slivers of land wedged between the respectively claimed borders of Serbia and Croatia which belong to… nobody¹ (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/19478817). Although the local Serbian border patrols will gladly point their rifles in your general direction to point out that this does not, in fact, mean you get to be there as far as they're concerned.
1: Head-line grabbing claims by assorted dreamers notwithstanding; hence Verdis.
munk-a•Jul 23, 2026
As an excellent example of #2 we've got Bir Tawil and the Halaib Triangle - both exist along the Sudanese-Egyptian border. Two different historical border drawings have been presented which each argue that the Halaib Triangle belongs to a different country and the triangle has 27k inhabitants. Funnily enough, each map that yields that valuable chunk of land to each country actually yields that Bir Tawil should be possessed by the other country (and Bir Tawil is comparatively worthless). As a result neither country claims Bir Tawil since it could be seen as an admission that the other country has a rightful claim to Halaib Triangle.
Usually these weird chunks of land that lay unclaimed are usually the result of agreements or contests around more valuable chunks of land that cause voids in the border - sometimes just due to historical oversight.
somat•Jul 23, 2026
My current favorite boundary dispute is between California and Nevada.
California entered the union in 1850 and it's north-eastern boundary was defined a specific way(120 degrees west of Greenwich), Nevada entered 14 years later and it's western boundary was defined with a different method(43 degrees west of Washington), at the time it was thought these two methods were equivalent, but this was later proved otherwise. It appears the main strip got resolved but there is still a weird triangular strip of land on the diagonal claimed by both sides. There were also a number of surveying mistakes, but the root of the problem appears to be the accepted but incompatible definitions. It turns out that congress has no authority to change state borders once they are set(Somehow this both surprised me and made total sense at the same time), so the states themselves have to resolve it. There is currently an "agreement" on how to interpret the border, but neither state has changed it's constitution so the dispute is still technically ongoing.
Wait, so it was actually believed that the Washington meridian just happened to fall exactly on an integer number of degrees (120-43 =77) west of Greenwich?
kps•Jul 23, 2026
Presumably defined rather than just happened, but not surveyed exactly enough. The US Capitol building is at 77.009°W.
dakial1•Jul 23, 2026
Speaking of which, something odd seems to be happening in Peru ocean limits https://osm.org/go/NSkYk-
Fittingly, Peru co-invented the 200-mile zone and still hasn't ratified UNCLOS — it uses its own dominio marítimo concept instead of an EEZ.
LelouBil•Jul 23, 2026
I started to contribute a lot to Openstreetmap since someone submitted the StreetComplete app a while ago !
It's amazing that something like this exists.
hamiltont•Jul 23, 2026
OSM is a truly incredible resource. It's often lightyears ahead of proprietary maps in terms of feature accuracy. Often far behind in terms of points-of-interest.
It powers painless adding of maps to so many products, painless offline data analytics and joins (I built https://wildpocket.com/ by joining OSM to iNaturalist data).
Truly incredible and under appreciated by general public. I love street complete, it opens up OSM to so many beginners with the simple UX. Think there's a big markets for "beginner-friendly" OSM work - I've prototyped https://mapmender.com/ to help map the "last mile" routes for emergency response that are inherently hard to keep updated
NetMageSCW•Jul 23, 2026
Is there any work on tooling for points of interest? Google Maps makes it easy for me to search and update when I see changes e.g. closed for vacation, etc.
haltcatchfire•Jul 23, 2026
A few days ago I was made aware of Street Complete here on HN. Same thing there - it makes it incredibly easy to submit additional data, such as opening hours and road types, to OSM.
Nice to see someone is keeping track of all of this in a logical way for all countries.
> Note: It has been decided not to add administrative boundaries of [super-national administrations] in OpenStreetMap. So please don't use admin_level=1.
Damn, I was hoping to see groups of countries (admin_level=1), and then groups of planets (admin_level=0), and then groups of stars (admin_level=-1), and then groups of galaxies (admin_level=-2). L. Ron Hubbard has surely established governments at all of these levels!
6 Comments
Fun fact: when you think of boundary disputes, two things tend to be assumed. One, this only happens in 'certain' countries. Two, this always means more than one country claims the same piece of land.
As for one: even the Netherlands and Germany claim the same bit of sea. Boundary status: unresolved (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/19478817#map=12/53.56...), but don't worry, we're friends and allies these days.
As for two: because of complex reasons to with their eventual bullshit bargaining position, there are several slivers of land wedged between the respectively claimed borders of Serbia and Croatia which belong to… nobody¹ (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/19478817). Although the local Serbian border patrols will gladly point their rifles in your general direction to point out that this does not, in fact, mean you get to be there as far as they're concerned.
1: Head-line grabbing claims by assorted dreamers notwithstanding; hence Verdis.
Usually these weird chunks of land that lay unclaimed are usually the result of agreements or contests around more valuable chunks of land that cause voids in the border - sometimes just due to historical oversight.
California entered the union in 1850 and it's north-eastern boundary was defined a specific way(120 degrees west of Greenwich), Nevada entered 14 years later and it's western boundary was defined with a different method(43 degrees west of Washington), at the time it was thought these two methods were equivalent, but this was later proved otherwise. It appears the main strip got resolved but there is still a weird triangular strip of land on the diagonal claimed by both sides. There were also a number of surveying mistakes, but the root of the problem appears to be the accepted but incompatible definitions. It turns out that congress has no authority to change state borders once they are set(Somehow this both surprised me and made total sense at the same time), so the states themselves have to resolve it. There is currently an "agreement" on how to interpret the border, but neither state has changed it's constitution so the dispute is still technically ongoing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Tahoe#Interstate_boundary...
It's amazing that something like this exists.
It powers painless adding of maps to so many products, painless offline data analytics and joins (I built https://wildpocket.com/ by joining OSM to iNaturalist data).
Truly incredible and under appreciated by general public. I love street complete, it opens up OSM to so many beginners with the simple UX. Think there's a big markets for "beginner-friendly" OSM work - I've prototyped https://mapmender.com/ to help map the "last mile" routes for emergency response that are inherently hard to keep updated
https://f-droid.org/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplete
Nice to see someone is keeping track of all of this in a logical way for all countries.
> Note: It has been decided not to add administrative boundaries of [super-national administrations] in OpenStreetMap. So please don't use admin_level=1.
Damn, I was hoping to see groups of countries (admin_level=1), and then groups of planets (admin_level=0), and then groups of stars (admin_level=-1), and then groups of galaxies (admin_level=-2). L. Ron Hubbard has surely established governments at all of these levels!