[OSM-dev] determining the boundaries of cities?

[Eric Marsden]

>>>>> "sp" == Stephan Plepelits <skunk at xover.htu.tuwien.ac.at> writes:

  > I don't think we have something like that, as - see above - the big  
  > question here remains: what is an urban area and what is a rural one?

  sp> Statistics Austria provides maps with "urban areas" for Austria. Their
  sp> definition, either:
  sp> - a built-up area with cleary visible road classification
  sp> - a group of houses sharing a place name
  sp> - a group of houses where the distance between each house is less than 200m
  sp> (Statistics Austria 2010, p. 1023).

  This is an interesting definition, and in areas where building
  outlines have been imported into OSM, some automated work to identify
  such boundaries would be possible.

  An alternative source of such data, for Europe, is available from the
  Corine land cover programme, which analyzes satellite imagery in
  different wavelengths to classify land use, using supervised machine
  learning techniques. They provide shapefiles of "continous urban
  fabric" and "discontinuous urban fabric".

  <http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/clc-2006-vector-data-version>
  
-- 
Eric Marsden