It makes sense to me to label the administrative center, if any, as well as the geometric centroid of the town polygon. It is not unusual for a town to expand more in one direction than another, particularly if is near a natural barrier such as a mountain range Orr a lake. Note that towns don't necessarily have their own administrative center; where I live (Nashville, Tennessee, USA), there is a metropolitan government (a merger of the Nashville city government and county government) that administers most of Davidson County), but a few communities have chosen to have their own local government.
-------Original Email------- Subject :Re: [OSM-talk] Nominatim & US places >From :mailto:[email protected] Date :Mon Jan 03 21:12:16 America/Chicago 2011 On 1/3/11 9:51 PM, Greg Troxel wrote: > Richard Welty<[email protected]> writes: > >> what i see a bit right now in the US are places where we have >> a central node from one import and a boundary with the same >> name from another, and as a result two names showing up. >> it's mildly annoying. > That may be true but Kurt is right. For most towns in New England > there is a polygon for the boundary, and then a specific place, often an > intersection or a village green or a few streets that should properly be > labeled as a point. > > If having a polygon with the name and a point with the name as a > "populated place" produces two names on the map, then the rendering is > arguably broken. It may be that if the town center point is in the map > view, the label should be put more or less there. there is an underlying data problem. the boundaries and center points are disconnected bits of data, and i would argue that it's not reasonable to demand that the rendering engines figure that relationship out. this is why i suggested adding a "centroid" tag to the boundary relations as a way to convey the place that is by convention considered the "center" of town. the existing gnis object for West Sand Lake, NY then can be placed in a boundary relation for West Sand Lake with a role of "centroid". now the rendering engine can just see if there's a centroid and use that, if not, it can compute its own. if it doesn't check for the centroid and computes its own anyway, that's really not particularly a failure, just not as nice as it could have been. richard _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk -- John F. Eldredge -- [email protected] "Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
