Ancestors

Written by Eugene Alvin Villar 🇵🇭 on 2025-01-21 at 09:04

As an amateur cartographer/geographer, this executive order making “Gulf of America” an official name in the United States for the Gulf of Mexico makes my head hurt. 🤬

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-names-that-honor-american-greatness/

[#]toponyms #cartography #geography #GulfOfMexico #uspol

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Written by Eugene Alvin Villar 🇵🇭 on 2025-01-22 at 18:11

I had this interpretation while reading the EO, but it seems that the “Gulf of America” name only applies to the area inside U.S. 🇺🇸 EEZ + continental shelf and not the whole gulf. This is the same interpretation that @maproomblog states here: https://www.maproomblog.com/2025/01/naming-the-gulf/

This is analogous to the “West Philippine Sea“ name that the #Philippines 🇵🇭 uses to refer to its vicinity within the South China Sea and not to the whole sea.

[#]toponyms #GulfOfMexico

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Written by Eugene Alvin Villar 🇵🇭 on 2025-01-22 at 18:17

Also, I am not at all surprised that the talk page of the #Wikipedia article on the gulf has exploded in response to the executive order. 😂

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gulf_of_Mexico

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Written by Eugene Alvin Villar 🇵🇭 on 2025-01-28 at 02:25

This news is not really surprising given that #GoogleMaps already serves government-compliant borders and labels depending from where you are visiting.

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/27/24353450/google-maps-rename-gulf-of-mexico-america-mt-mckinley

[#]maps #cartography #toponyms #gischat #Google #GulfOfMexico

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Written by Ian Wagner on 2025-01-28 at 02:46

@seav heh... yeah, it's complicated.... I actually have some sympathy for their position though, given that "non-compliance" typically results in fines or bans. For example, apparently it's illegal in India to display any border other than the one that the govt says is the border. Which technically makes OSM an illegal map since it shows disputed borders differently. Similarly in China, unless you show everything exactly as "officially recognized" then you'll get banned.

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Written by Ian Wagner on 2025-01-28 at 02:51

@seav Our OSM-derived maps are currently blocked in China as far as I'm aware, simply because we show things as they are. But on the other hand, I think that having "maps from the perspective of country X" as a selectable option is useful for vendors to offer. It's something I've considered, but it's quite complicated + expensive to keep up, to say the least 😅

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Written by Eugene Alvin Villar 🇵🇭 on 2025-01-28 at 05:03

@ianthetechie I kinda like that for small-scale maps, #NaturalEarth attempts to provide POV borders. But, yeah, this is hard to do at OSM's level of detail.

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Written by Ian Dees on 2025-01-28 at 05:29

@seav @ianthetechie while at Snap we worked pretty hard to add more in-depth disputed borders support to OSM and Natural Earth so that we could render different world views and be in compliance for most places. It still works pretty well as far as I can tell.

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Toot

Written by Eugene Alvin Villar 🇵🇭 on 2025-01-28 at 06:30

@ian I think I missed this, but is the schema for modeling disputed borders in OSM as used by Snap (or upsteam service providers [Mapbox?]) documented somewhere?

@ianthetechie

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Descendants

Written by Ian Dees on 2025-01-28 at 18:15

@seav @ianthetechie it was added to the Tilezen tiles: https://github.com/tilezen/vector-datasource/releases/tag/v1.9.0. The public Nextzen tiles were never rebuilt with this, but the in-house tiles at Snap have the data. I'm not aware of any other provider that uses the data. I know Mapbox has worldview data (https://docs.mapbox.com/data/boundaries/reference/mapbox-boundaries-v4/#worldview-text) and Facebook has something similar, but they use different schema based on commercial (not OSM) data

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