Update/establish best practices for OCD-ID types across countries about ocd-division-ids HOT 2 OPEN

Using the local terms will always make sense for local users.

A challenge only arises when a user (1) wants to use OCDIDs from multiple jurisdictions and (2) needs to know whether a division type in one jurisdiction corresponds to a division type in another jurisdiction. (@jdmgoogle Can you provide a specific use case?)

Now, the problem of deciding whether two divisions in two jurisdictions are of the same type is not a solved problem – by anyone, anywhere.

• ISO 3166 has ISO 3166-2 for country subdivisions, but these are not organized according to a common, cross-jurisdiction hierarchy, and these cover many types of subdivisions without establishing where each is placed in the hierarchy.
• NUTS has many cases that do not correspond to the truth on the ground; for example, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are considered to be the same level or hierarchy as the regions of England.

GeoNames and others all likely have other issues as well, where, most likely, a maintainer had to decide what hierarchy to follow, which might not match reality.

In other words, trying to establish a worldwide crosswalk of division types is likely a fool's errand.

That said, I think it's fine for users to create aliases to the canonical IDs, where the aliases would attempt to organize the world into a single hierarchy of division types.

This repo, however, for the canonical IDs, should use division types that have a local meaning to better match reality.

from ocd-division-ids.

Noting comments in #184 (comment) and below about a desire for a metadata file format for defining OCD types.

from ocd-division-ids.