Define admin_level by country

[pracj3am]

Do you want to request a feature or report a bug?

Documentation bug

What is the current behavior?

According to https://github.com/algolia/places/blob/master/PIPELINE_CHANGELOG.md it should be possible to define admin levels by country, but I can't find it anywhere in documentation or code.

What is the expected behavior?

It is important for us to define correct admin levels, because in some countries the default values for administrative are wrong.

[raphi]

Hi @pracj3am

Indeed, we do not expose this information. It is being used internally in our backend (aka the changes in the Pipeline Changelog you linked). This PIPELINE CHANGELOG is meant to expose to our users the different features/bugs/improvements made in our backend which isn't displayed in this javascript client repo.

We rely on OSM + Nominatim for admin levels but also do our own mapping due to incoherence in their data. There are 30+ levels internally and exposing them to our users wouldn't add much value.

Indeed, this is a complex topic as every country (and sometimes inside the same country...) can have different levels of expressing administratives levels (some have only 3 for their entire country, other 15+...). And we have to "fit" them into generic fields (country/admin/county/city) for the ease of our end users.

However, could tell us in which country you experience wrong admin levels with some examples?

Thanks!

[pracj3am]

@raphi Thank you for response and explanation. In that case it would help some place, where you can report correct admin_level, because – as you say – every country is different, and it seems that initial setup was not correct everywhere.

I experience wrong admin_level in my own country – Czech republic, where you chose as administrative NUTS2 regions (admin_level=4 in OSM). Problem is that NUTS2 are regions created just on paper, because European union needed that. In reality NUTS3 are used (for elections, government budget are divided to them for healthcare, education, public transport etc), there are also signs on road with name of "NUTS3" regions. So everybody in Czech republic knows NUTS3 division, and hardly anybody NUTS2. see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary=administrative?uselang=en-US#10_admin_level_values_for_specific_countries

So could you change the admin_level from 4 to 6 for Czech republic?

[pracj3am]

Any update on this? Thanks!

[Haroenv]

Unfortunately the places product has been sunset and will stop working May 2022, therefore there were no updates made to this: https://www.algolia.com/blog/product/sunsetting-our-places-feature/

[pracj3am]

Okay, noted.