dependent territory

Things like universities or office complexes and airports . Something something something, Burning Man and other annual events. Basically places that issue passports, notwithstanding the details (like empires which actually issue the passports...) This needs a better - that is more abstract - name. Like "region" instead of state, province, whatever... but for counties. It's not a sub-region of a country but rather dependent on a parent country for defence, passport control, subsidies, etc. Places that one or more parties claim as their own. As of this writing all disputed places are parented only by the country (and higher) IDs of the claimants. This isn't to say there aren't more granular hierarchies to be applied to these place only that we are starting with the simple stuff first. Or "sovereignty" but really... empire. For example the Meta United States that contains both the US and Puerto Rico. In many countries, the lowest level of government. They contain one or more localities (or "populated places") which themselves have no authority. Often but not exclusively found in Europe. Towns and cities, independent of size or population. Things with neighbourhoods, basically. Like "BoCoCa" which in WOE is a neighbourhood that parents another... neighbourhood. Things like "The Bay Area" – this one is hard so we shouldn't spend too much time worrying about the details yet but instead treat as something we want to do eventually. Because all place is disputed. And everyone has a name for a place that will offend someone else. The really big marine areas. The ones that you sometimes feel cast adrift on... Things with walls, often but mostly things that people stand around together . Things with walls might be public (a bar) or private (your apartment) by default. We just followed Geonames' lead and have assigned XK to be the ISO country code for Kosovo. The following is a verbatim written exercise to work through the issue of how a hierarchy should be represented or, more specifically, how the potentially multiple hierarchies that a given place might encompass should be represented. Something something something as elements on the root properties dictionary. Like this: Something something something as a dictionary on the root properties dictionary. Like this: Meanwhile we also know that we want to support certain place types that will have multiple parents (because geography) like metropolitain areas or, if we choose to include them in the gazetteer proper, road networks. At a minimum this means that some of the values for placetypes have to be lists which probably means all of the values should be lists so that people don't have to think about context or test data types. For example: However, it is possible to imagine a place type with not only multiple parents but multiple ancestors. A timezone or, again, a road network. In which case you find yourself with a dictionary whose values are lists of dictionaries. At which point you risk spiralling off in to Semantic Web graph theory quicksand. So maybe the thing to do is suffer mixed content (unique IDs and lists) where the rule is the immediate (outer) hierarchy stops the moment there are multiple parents. Like this: