[OSM-dev] Major improvements to MapOSMatic

[Ulf Lamping]

Am 05.01.2010 13:51, schrieb Thomas Petazzoni:
> Hello,
>
> Le Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:08:14 +0100,
> Ulf Lamping<ulf.lamping at googlemail.com>  a écrit :
>
>> Keeping the default level 8 would be ok here in germany :-)
>
> We have been told by other users from Germany that level 8 doesn't work
> for large cities such as Berlin or Münich. I've been told that level 6
> was the appropriate level for Germany.
>
> On the other hand, on http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org, I only find a
> level 4 boundary for Berlin (level 4 seems to be the Länder level,
> because Berlin is at the same time a city and a Länder).
>
> Why level should be used in Germany ?

Ok, let me be more detailed.

First of all, I'm not an expert on this, so correct me anyone if I'm wrong.

Here in germany, we have the 16 Bundesländer (single: Bundesland) [1], 
which varies from large ones (e.g. Bayern/Bavaria) to exactly 3 "small 
areas", namely the cities: Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin. This is what 
admin_level 4 is about.

I'm not 100% sure about admin_level 6, this would probably be larger 
cities like Munich (the wiki is talking about "district free 
cities"/"kreisfreie Stadt").

admin_level 8 would be a "small/smaller city".

I personally wanted to render the southern part of Nürnberg, which would 
be probably admin_level 9 or even 10 (however, maposmatic couldn't find 
a proper admin_level anyway, so I did the selection "by hand").


At the end of the day, there is no one "right" admin_level, when you 
both want to support Berlin (population: 3.400.000) and also Betzenstein 
(population: 2500) :-)

Regards, ULFL

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_of_Germany

P.S: Might be a good idea to indicate on the webpage, that 
admin_level=xy is the criteria the server is searching for - I was 
pretty uncertain what the webpage was actually doing when searching for 
the boundary.