"Andrew S. J. Sawyer" <assaw...@gmail.com> writes: > My thoughts are mixed in below. > > On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 11:17, Peter Budny <pet...@gatech.edu> wrote: > > 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. > > Slight correction, not all land in the Northeast is incorporated. In New > Hampshire there are a handful of communities which are not > incorporated.
I was exaggerating to illustrate the differences, but point taken. > > 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. > > I agree that there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach that will work > with displaying/tagging named communities on the map. I think that a > combination of the size of the given area, the "admin_level" of the > given area (country, state, county, etc), population and > recognizability (capital cities, etc). The latter being the most > difficult to quantify in a manner in which many people would agree on > (less capital cities). I forgot to mention control cities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_city). These are cities that are designated for use on highway signs to indicate which direction you're heading. These should definitely appear on the map, even if they're relatively small cities (e.g. Valdosta, Georgia). > However, I agree that a ratio of area, "admin_level" and population > could take care of most cases. This gets me wondering if maybe there's some way to do it more automatically. For instance, it should be easy to find data sources for population, area, and lists of "global cities" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city) and control cities. Maybe there should be a process just before the renderer that takes in that information and decides how to label cities automatically. That keeps the OSM database down to the basics. -- Peter Budny \ Georgia Tech \ CS PhD student \ _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
