“Departments” of France

Oh, and it occurs to me after looking back at the current Map Lists, that the first subcategory lists of France, the U.S. and all other countries I look at have tags under the subcategory names saying “Region.”

It’s true of France that the heirarchy goes Country > Region > Department > commune (?), I think.

But in the U.S., it goes Country > State > County/City, etc. Perhaps the “Region” tag in the Map List should just be dropped? It might actually be more confusing than it is correct!

Thanks!

Thanks for your consideration! Yes, the borders for French Regions are quite exact.

I think it’s not the borders, on the map, that are the main concern. Mostly it’s a Search/List function. (And this may be true of other countries, I don’t know!) Since most references to places in France use a Department, it would be handy to have the data listed that wy, or to be able to View-on-Map for a Department.

And while I have your ear, would it be possible to consider the line styles for borders? It looks to me as if National borders are solid gray, and remain so at all zoom levels.

In the Unites States, the Regional (state) borders are dashed gray lines, but at some close zoom level they become dashed purple. I think this is the same in France. (There are no Counties for England, Scotland, etc. People almost always refer to counties when giving locations in England.) It would be nice if these admin subboundaries could stay the same style (which should probably also always be gray) at all zoom levels. It gets confusing when they change to a style that looks very much like another type of boundary!

Thank you very much.

I’m looking forward to future tweaks!

Dear Olivier,

Interesting! Thanks for adding to the discussion.

BUT when we travel and for leisure activities we usually use “régions”
(ex: “I visited my family in Brittany last summer”). I also think most
travel guides are organised primarily by “régions” both to simplify
access and because they have a stronger cultural identity.

OK, that’s interesting. Yes, probably most guides are organized by something like regions. But the Guide Regions don’t always correspond exactly to the official regions!

As Pocket Earth is about travelling, I would recommend keeping “régions”
as the first subcategory. Adding a second subcategory with
“départements” would be a nice touch, but I don’t see it as a priority.

Well, I’m using PE for traveling. But as a user, I’d like to see PE be as successful as possible, and limiting its scope or usefulness to the concerns of travelers is perhaps not the grandest vision possible! PE could be useful to all kinds of people doing things/gathering or generating information “out in the field,” so to speak. I don’t know, archaeologists, or somebody. Although perhaps specialists have specialized software!

Anyhow, I’m a sometime database developer&user, and my experience is the more ways there are to collect and organize information the better. So long as “the ways” are reasonably easy to understand and use, and the lesser ones don’t interfere with the more common. Hah!

Along those lines, I’m collecting information from a lot of web sites: Les Plus Beau Villages de France, RandoGPS.net, the Megalithic Portal, etc. All the web sites I visit map and list by départements. I assume this limits the length of lists, makes map sections smaller and easier to see, etc. It would be handy to be able to use PE to show map areas that correspond to the Lists!

Thanks for listening!

Thanks, Ozgeo. Geomagik did say “We will be moving over to OSM data for this in the future which will be
more comprehensive and have better multi-lingual and country specific
support.” So we’ll see what happens!