On 2014-11-25 01:29, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
2014-11-24 21:18 GMT+01:00 Minh Nguyen
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>:
Assuming this table reflects the actual state of the map, most
countries have chosen 4 for their state equivalents.
Actually, many countries do not have something like a "state
equivalent", it is a particularity of the USA because they are a federal
republic.
I understand; I just meant that most countries have chosen admin_level=4
for the second-level governmental authority, regardless of any autonomy
or sovereignty. That is, most of the level 3 entries in the table are
for entities that have no legislative or executive function. I don't
think it was historically viewed as a problem that admin_level=4s in
different countries had varying levels of autonomy.
This level-skipping scheme extends all the way down to the smallest
jurisdictions. Because the TIGERcnl import chose admin_level=8 for
municipalities, skipping 7, I was able to tag Ohio townships as 7
without demoting all the state's cities and villages. [2] Even
though neighboring Kentucky and West Virginia lack a level of
government between counties and municipalities, it makes sense to
keep cities in most states at the same admin_level, because they're
functionally equivalent. (Virginia is a notable exception.)
I was not going to get into discussion about cities and other lower
level admin entities. Please lets stick to the state question.
My point is that there's a pattern. Using 4 for states is not an
arbitrary choice, but rather an intentional way of leaving room for
additional detail.
Incidentally, [1] is silent on the question of Indian reservations, a
topic that has come up periodically on this list. Is there any consensus
on how to tag them? If so, it should be reflected in the table.
For context, there's an open pull request to have the Standard
stylesheet render country and state labels based on administrative
boundary polygons rather than place nodes. [3]
yes, this is also something I wanted to point to, because in the
discussion for this style change it was argued that some countries,
which currently do use level 3, should change that to level 4 (like the
US), and I was arguing the other way round, that the US should probably
change the states to level 3 instead.
It sounds like the intention is to preserve U.S. state labels at z4 (by
promoting them to level 3) while demoting subdivisions of smaller
countries to higher zoom levels (by keeping them at level 4). I'm all
for a more readable map of Europe, but basing admin_levels on degrees of
autonomy won't really solve the problem. Some federal republics have
relatively small second-level divisions (e.g., Switzerland), while some
very large second-level divisions happen to be provinces of Canada,
which is not a federal republic.
Martin, how would the U.S. would be affected by this change? As it
stands, U.S. state boundaries and labels appear at z4 and above,
regardless of the state's size. Of the smallest states, Rhode Island
(RI) appears at z4 and z6+, Connecticut (CT) appears at z4+, and
Maryland (MD) and Delaware (DE) are both obscured at z4 by the label
for Washington, D.C.
At a glance, this change would seemingly omit most of the
Northeastern states' labels at z4.
It appears to set a minimum size of 750 "way pixels" at z4 and 3,000
at z5 for displaying a state's label. I don't really see those
states' two-letter refs as being clutter.
I am not sure why raising the importance would lead to less names
displayed. If this holds true, the stylesheet would have to adopt to
correct this IMHO.
Sorry, I should've been clearer. It seemed to me like the proposed
stylesheet change would cause some labels to disappear at z4-5 without
any changes to the data, because the stylesheet would enforce a minimum
area, whereas currently it doesn't. But I haven't tried out the change,
so hopefully I'm wrong and the U.S. will look good either way. :-)
[1] http://wiki.osm.org/wiki/United_States_admin_level
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