2010/5/27 Roy Wallace <waldo000...@gmail.com>: > Consider the highway=* tag, which has come to refer to "the importance > of the highway for the road grid". Compare this to Simone's suggestion > that the place=* tag should refer to "an idea about the urban texture > of the country". Very similar ideas. If Simone's suggestion is the > consensus, perhaps it is worth trying to clarify this further.
As I said, my comment was related to a recent discussion on talk-it. Places were re-tagged, downgrading cities to towns if they had less than 100.000 abitants AND they were not the capital of a region (in the administrative sense of Regione). The result was that many a place we'd expect to see on the map was not there. After a while, places were re-tagged again, setting the bar to 50.000 abitants for province capitals. Still, there was discussion about whether we should change (lower) the population thresholds. In the end, there are many factors to consider (historical, economical, urbanistic matters), and it's hard to summarize them all in a population range - especially in Italy, where cities with a few tenths of thousands inhabitants may have been the capital of an influential duchy or state. This is nothing knew, and probably is the same thing that has been repeated lots of times well before I was even here. Many criteria were proposed, including the usual one involving the legal definition of "città" (which has been rejected, as it would make cities out of very small centres). In the end, many of us agreed on the "urban texture of the country" concept. Let me report what was said - I admit I had no previous knowledge on this subject, so sorry if I am imprecise. We noted that France or Austria revolve around a very large centre, i.e., Paris, or Wien, with a few more large cities and the rest of the country consisting of small, non-influential centres. On the other hand, Germany or Italy are "multi-centric", consisting of many large centres surrounded by less influential centres surrounded by minor centres. In other words, the pyramidal structure of the centres, based on their importance, has a very acute vertex in France, while it's more "spread-out" in Italy. As a consequence, while it is good to see the map of France showing five cities, Italy's map should instead contain a few tenths. Of course, this cannot be achieved if we only look at population - especially if we want to use a world-wide population criterion. I hope the idea is clear. Regards, Simone _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
