Antony Pegg <anttheli...@gmail.com> writes: > tagging admin area / populated centers / labels in USA seems to come down to > two main tags: > > admin_level and place
Before you over-simplify, let me point out a couple things: 1. Not all of the US is incorporated. In the Northeast, every tiny part of land is incorporated into a town or township or borough. But in the Southeast (and I presume elsewhere as well), there's lots of unincorporated land, even in the vicinity of large cities. Look at Atlanta, which still has lots of unincorporated area. That's a big variation, and the map needs to be equally competent at handling both regions. 2. Defining how "important" a city is (and thus, how big its label on the map should be) is a tricky thing to do. Population is certainly a large factor, but how do you define this? The City of Atlanta is the #33 most populous city in the US, with 540,000 people, but the Atlanta metropolitan area is #9 with 5,475,000 people and is the largest metro area in 800 miles. There's also a recognition factor... the whole world knows where New York is and would expect it to be fairly prominent on a map. Capitol cities are considered to be "important" even when they're not very prominent or populous. Etc. It seems to me that admin_level handles the first point, except that 4 levels to cover all of the US doesn't give much granularity. Maybe we need to think about using the in-between levels to show more detail? place= seems to be handling the second point, but not very well. Should label sizes really be determined purely by population? By "importance"? What criteria should there be? I don't think the current scheme of city/town/whatever is very good, because it's another instance of hacking a British scheme onto a country with a very different history and organization. -- Peter Budny \ Georgia Tech \ CS PhD student \ _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
