Richard Oliver wrote:
> There is no standard definition of `historical county', and although
> the official OS line is that it would be `confusing' to users to show
> both historic and current county boundaries, and it would certainly add
> a cost which might be hard to justify in commercial terms...
If a conference of academics, commercial users, and plain old people
(citizens, voters, taxpayers, OS retail customers) couldn't settle on a set
of customary counties, OS can do it to most people's satisfaction for most
places in Britain by using standard maps from ca. 1844-88, as Mr. Oliver
suggests. OS wouldn't have to *display* customary boundaries on smaller
than about 1:50,000 maps--which should be fairly easy--and represent the
identifications in an online gazetteer such as the Landranger 250,000-name
database. How costly could that be as they probably still have the data
tucked away in their computers? dBase II could do that sort of matching!
Al Magary
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