Serge, I agree with Silver Spring MD being something other than a hamlet.
That extends to Reston VA, Bethesda MD, Dundalk MD, Ellicott MD, and other Census CDPs with substantial populations. The political ramifications of not differentiating them from incorporated areas are ugly. As long as these areas can be distinguished by an extra tag or 2 I don't see a problem. The TIGER:classfp tag does distinguish in a way. http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/fips55codedef.html Carl Anderson cander...@spatialfocus.com carl.ander...@vadose.org On Aug 31, 2010 10:48 AM, "Serge Wroclawski" <emac...@gmail.com> wrote: On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 7:56 AM, Carl Anderson <carl.ander...@vadose.org> wrote: > Serge, > > To com... Right, I remember that because every year on my taxes, I have to put in that I don't live in any of the listed towns in my county. > Census has it as a CDP (Census designated place) a non politically bounded > area that the Census... To put this into perspective to people who don't live in the DC area, a few things to keep in mind about this region: Both Silver Spring and Takoma Park border DC. But "Takoma Park" is locally ambiguous in common speech, as it can mean either the town of Takoma Park, or the section of DC which is called Takoma Park. They're politically distinct but as a long time resident of the area, they're culturally one in the same. On the other hand, Silver Spring is not locally ambiguous. You know when you're in it and when you're not, political boundries be darned. Takoma Park proper has a population of about 11,000 people, while Silver Spring has a population of 80,000. Now that's over.. here's the question we need to answer: Is OSM a reflection of the political borders, or is it a reflection of the people? That's where the push/pull of using official Census ontology comes in. Yes, Silver Spring doesn't exist as a town, but it does exist as a place for its residents, and at 80,000, it's on the edge of being a city (and remember the 76k number is from 2000, before some of the new highrises were built downtown). It just makes no sense to me that an area with this high population and population density is labeled a hamlet. - Serge _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list talk...@openstreetmap... _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
