On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 12:34 PM, David Earl <[email protected]> wrote: > On 23/03/2009 12:13, Adam Schreiber wrote: >> On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Elena of Valhalla >> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> finding a working algorithm that uses only objective data and is >>> always able to select the proper item to print would be excellent, but >>> also probably not feasible in real life. >> Population? People can vote importance with their feet. > Population's not enough. Some places "punch above their weight" - the > example I like to use is Hay-on-Wye in Powys. It's under 2,000 people > but is most clearly an important market town for the surrounding area. > In population it would be a modest village, but it is more important > than that.
I've been finding that the number of hotels (within the city area as defined by builtup_area file) is a surprisingly effective method of calculating the importance of a place, with the added advantage that it is data already present in OSM. It does suffer from the problem that not every mapper considers hotels to be worth mapping, and that areas not mapped get an artificially low importance - but in most cases it seems to work and will hopefully improve with time. -- Brian _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
