[OSM-newbies] Groups of streets

[Richard Weait]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 7:19 PM, Donald Campbell II
<donaciano2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to figure out how to properly tag this situation.  The area in
> question is here
> (http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=6.79723&lon=-58.12416&zoom=15&layers=B000FTF).
>  Notice there's 4 strips of neighborhoods going northeast that are
> surrounded by tertiary roads.  The four are together known as the Sophia
> village.  It's broken into 4 "fields" so the Westmost one is referred to as
> "A Field", then "B field", and so on.  On signs they're referred to as
> "Section A", "Section B", etc... so that's how I've labeled them with "A
> Field" and "B Field" using loc_name tags.

Dear Don,

This looks interesting to me.  I'm completely ignorant of what things
are like on the ground in Guyana.  So please understand that I'm
taking some wild guesses here.  Could you share with us how you gained
your Guyanese mapping experience?  Sounds like there must be an
interesting story there.

Basically, I think you have a good tagging scheme.  One minor
suggestion is that if the signs say "Section A" perhaps you should say
"Section A" rather than "Field A".  If the signs say "Section A" but
everybody says "Field A" that might be an argument for
name=Section A and
loc_name=Field A

Your use of village, hamlet and locality all seem to work.  If you are
recognizing official designations and making good use of hierarchy,
given the truth on the ground ... Why argue?

This area is a good example of why we should aim for good semantic
tagging, rather than tagging of one renderer.  If you look at mapnik,
as seen in your link, the blocks are labeled on the perimeter of the
block area.

In this example, you can see that "Block 7" is written, 'around the
corner' of the you drew.  No line is drawn for this locality area in
this mapnik rendering.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=6.80137&lon=-58.125396&zoom=18&layers=B000FTF

By comparison this is the same place in osmarender.  The "Block 7"
label is printed in the center of the area.  Still no boundary line is
shown for the block 7 locality.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=6.80137&lon=-58.1254&zoom=17&layers=0B00FTF

Both are right.  Preference is a matter of style.  If you wanted to
make your own render of this area for a local map, you might consider
drawing waterway=ditch, which doesn't appear in either render above,
or draw the block boundaries and label the mid-point.  Or perhaps not.
 It depends on your audience.  ;-)

Another scheme that could work would use boundary relations, rather
than independent boundary polygons.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations/Proposed/Boundaries

While boundary relations might be considered "harder" and would still
work, you might also consider only nodes for locality=block as a
"simpler" tagging scheme.  Each of these, and your scheme all seem to
work and I'd hesitate to recommend one over another without some local
experience.  In general, perhaps these very loose guidelines:
- nodes, if the boundaries are unofficial and variable depending on
who you ask.
- simple areas, if the boundaries are official / recognized.
- boundary relations if the mapper is comfortable with relations.