Country borders issue!

General talk
1

Hello everyone,
i’m new to OSM so please bare with me :slight_smile:

I’m working on a geolocation project for a Moroccan organization, and the problem i’m facing is related to the ‘Western Sahara Conflict’.
As you may know, Morocco is claiming its sovereignty in Western Sahara. Therefore the organzation i’m working with refuse to acknowledge Maps containing any kind of separation between Morocco and the Western Sahara. Unfortunately, all the Map providers only provide maps with either a separation line or dots.
Is there any kind of solution or workaround to prevent the separation line or dots from appearing on the Map ? Or to use some kind of other Map ?

Any help is very much appreciated :slight_smile:
Thanks in advance.

2

I think there are some special rose-colored glasses you can have them wear :slight_smile:

3

The only feasible alternative I see is to download the data yourself, modify it to reflect your countries official view, and then render your own maps with that data.

4

thank you very much for answering :slight_smile:

i’m quite new to OSM. how can i download the data ? and after modifying it, would i be still able to access it via OSM ?
sorry if it’s not very clear, i’m trying my best to explain it :frowning:

5

You might want to have a look here and download the appropriate bounding box. You can do everything you want with the data as long as you don’t upload the changed country borders back to OSM servers.

6

For the data, either download the whole planet or an Africa extract. You’re going to need a big server to process the whole planet. Not so much for Africa alone. Then you modify that downloaded data to suit your government’s view on the borders.

You can then import that data into a database suitable to render a map with Mapnik, or render the map with Osmarender. There are some other options too, like Kosmos.

Either way, the data that is in OSM, and which is what you edit using Potlatch/JOSM/Merkaartor, will stay the same. If you update OSM, you’ll have to go through the steps above to download, modify, and then rerender your data.

7

thank you guys a lot! i’m gonna try this and get back to you :slight_smile:

8

Another option would be to edit the rendering rules to not render any administrative borders. ie just delete all of the style rules for boundary=administrative. Or just the rules for admin_level=2 if you just want to get rid of the national borders.
For Mapnik, I think you would have to edit the inc/layer-admin.xml.inc file.

Then you don’t have to modify the OSM data, just render it and you will get a map without any borders.