Norwegian administrative boundary changes on 1 Jan 2020

Hallo,

apologies that I don’t speak Norwegian. I hope it is ok if I post in English. Feel free to answer in Norwegian if easier and I will figure it out.

I have heard (from a Norwegian customer for whom I do some processing of OSM data) that some administrative boundaries in Norway will change on 1 Jan 2020. As an example Troms and Finnmark will merge to become “Troms og Finnmark”.

In total the list I have is about 50 such mergers, 12 counties that will merge into 6, and about many municipalities.

My questions:

  • is this correct? Can anyone point me to an official website with an overview of the changes and the exact schedule?

  • does any one have a comprehensive list of the changes that will happen? Not just of the new names, but the new refs? will “Troms og Finnmark” be NO-19, NO-20, or something new?

  • is there any plan or schedule by the Norwegian OSM community to make these changes in OSM? If not I am happy to help, but of course from the context of only limited local knowledge.

thanks for your attention and your help

Yes, new refs as well.

Here is a comprehensive list from the government: https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/nye-kommune–og-fylkesnummer-fra-2020/id2576659/

We will be able to handle it.

I plan to implement all the necessary changes to boundaries after Christmas. Most of the new boundary lines and relations, as well as municipality refs have already been created in OSM, but have not been activated with correct tagging yet.

Here is a wiki for the project: Norway/Administrative grenser. Contains several links to resources.

The new highways ref’s are for the most part completed, except for the counties of Nordland and Sogn og Fjordane, which will need to be completed before Christmas.

Many import scripts which depends on administrative boundaries in OSM will need updating and testing, for example the monthly address import/update. This will be handled in January 2020.

Thanks for the fast and helpful answer. This is exactly what I need.

Is there a plan or working group of who will make the changes in OSM and when? Will there be an import?
I am just trying to define a schedule of when to deal with this.
I am happy to help

thanks again

I think the best way forward is to allow NKA to perform this task according to his plan. I believe the Norwegian community has full confidence in his ability to accomplish the task.

The changes will be made over the last week of the 2019. During that week the Norwegian county and municipality boundaries in OSM may be inconsistent. The plan is to have it all completed by 1 January 2020.

Hi everyone,

this is fantastic. An amazing example of the power of crowd-sourcing. Great work.
Please ping me if any of you are in Barcelona (where I am based) and the first beer will be on me.

The update of municipalities and counties has been completed now. The former municipalities and counties, including their boundary ways, have been kept as multipolygons. These relations may be searched using “was:place=municipality” or “was:place=county”.

The update involved a large number of ways and relations so there could be errors. Please help verifying boundaries before 1.1.2020.

One remaining task is to update street names. Several municipalities which merged had conflicting street names. The municipalities have changed the names of these streets during 2019, but few have been updated in OSM. There is no organized activity to update them. They may be discovered using OSM Inspector in JOSM (street name not equal to address node name), or they could be found by downloading address node changes for 2019 for the relevant municipalities (look for clusters of changed address nodes).

Congratulations! Great work. I (and my client) will start checking to see if I find any errors.

One thing to be aware of - nominatim has various error checks to prevent mistaken edits and vandalism from going live. Changes to certain admin levels will not go live without a manual push. I will see if I can get this to happen on 1 Jan.

Thanks again for your efforts and all good wishes for a great 2020

Just for reference I know Simon Poole & Christian Quest have performed similar updates for Switzerland & France in the past on 1st Jan. Swiss updates are scheduled for this year too: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Switzerland/2020_Municipality_Mergers