Looking at some big cities in Europe I find (not for the first time, I know) some mapping bugs regarding some of the more important cities, e.g. L'Hospitalet de Llolobregad [1], Treviso [2], Avellino [3],
[1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=41.43&mlon=2.11&zoom=7&layers=M [2] http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=45.55&mlon=12.34&zoom=6&layers=M [3] http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=40.85&mlon=14.28&zoom=6&layers=M or should I name Barcelona, Venice and Naples? This issue is not raised for the first time, and there is some interesting ideas in the wiki how the situation could be improved, but those would require complicated preprocessing. I feel that this issue could be solved easier with the help of the crowd. The problem is that place currently offers too few possibilities on the upper end to classify cities, in deed there is only town and city for bigger settlements, plus the capital attribute (which is about administration though). I see two ways to face this: 1. downgrade smaller and less important cities that are formally meeting the population criteria but are much less important then a nearby bigger city (see examples above). This would degrade them to town level which is not very elegant, as it would enlarge the range of town enormously. 2. upgrade the big and important cities to a level (or two) above city, be it with an attribute (e.g. metrolis=yes) or with a "new" place class (e.g. place=metropolis). Looking at the stylesheet for mapnik, the ingenious makers have already thought about this and prepared the styles to understand place=metropolis as well. Looking at the current tags, there is no place=metropolis (or fewer then 3) and no Key:metropolis. There is a proposal in the wiki by user: MojaveNC which doesn't look bad: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Metropolis I'd like to reactivate this, what do you think? I know that there is suggestions in the wiki to calculate the importance by considering multiple attributes like airports, universities, adminstrative functions, economical importance, etc., which would be nice to have but are not a good enough reason not to fix the missing place values. cheers, Martin _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
