The discussion of finding Paris Ontario equated to Paris France just now reminds me to raise again the granularity of our place hierarchy. Notwithstanding value judgements people make about what is a "town", not just based on population, I still think we need some more levels in the city - town - village - hamlet hierarchy.
I could use population in the namefinder (and ditto for caption size, priority etc in renderers) if that were given more widely, but the problem is that in the UK at least this information is subject to crown copyright (I assume any one figure is a fact, and therefore not copyright, but the collection is database copyright). I think we could do with a richer hierarchy something like this: metropolis > 500,000 city > 100,000 large_town > 25,000? 40,000? town > 10,000 small_town / large_village > 2,500 village > 100 hamlet < 100 I'm sure we can argue about the names and numbers, but I don't think that's too important as people will always bring their own local knowledge to bear as well, not least based on what the place chooses to call itself. For example, Hay-on-Wye (Y-Gelli), Powys is most definitely a town even though it has fewer than 2,000 people, but Linton, Cambridgeshire is a "village" of nearly 5,000 souls. Another possibility is to make judgements about "importance" based on land area. I think this would be hard, though not completely impossible, to infer automatically from the data, but I wonder if a "radius" value on the place might help - "a circle approximately this big would enclose the place". Perhaps over-exaggerates coastal settlements and others which aren't blobs, so can only be a coarse judgement, but it might help me in deciding what "in" and "near" mean in the context of searches, especially for places which "punch above their weight". David _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
