2010/10/20 Peter Budny <pet...@gatech.edu>: > 2. Defining how "important" a city is (and thus, how big its label on > the map should be) is a tricky thing to do. Population is certainly a > large factor, but how do you define this? The City of Atlanta is the > #33 most populous city in the US, with 540,000 people, but the Atlanta > metropolitan area is #9 with 5,475,000 people and is the largest metro > area in 800 miles.
good you mention this, there are similar cases in Europe. E.g. Stuttgart counts 601.646 inhabitants, but the metropolitan area has 5.3 Million ranking 12th in Europe before Munich (5.2 Million met.area, 1.33 million inhabitants city) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolregion#Die_gr.C3.B6.C3.9Ften_Metropolregionen_Europas We already have had similar discussions on the German list, where the result was to add as much detail as you can to help the rendering application choose the one they are interested in. The resulting matrix is here (in German, sorry): http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:Anzeige_von_St%C3%A4dten#Deutschland The legend: HS = Hauptstadt --- capital MR = Metropolregion --- metropolitan region F = Flughafen --- airport H = Überseehafen --- harbour with overseas traffic B = Bahnknotenpunkt --- important railway intersection OZ = Oberzentrum --- main regional centre (?) MZ = Mittelzentrum --- medium regional centre (?) Uni = University, one x per 10 000 students another approach from the same page is titled "dominance" where dominance expresses the distance to the next "higher" (in terms of importance / population) place. The higher (in terms of distance) the more dominant. This serves to determine which names to show and which to omit. (in scarse areas you would want to see also smaller places, but in concentrated areas you will have to omit also big cities in favour of even bigger (or more important according to a scheme like the above described one) ones. cheers, Martin _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
