[Routing] "correct" tagging of city/country/suburb/zip-code Was: No tags like "country" and "city" in planet.osm for ways?

[Marcus Wolschon]

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Frederik Ramm schrieb:
> Hi,
> 
>>  I don't think, that the distance-from-target calculation is a good
>>  solution, because a road at the periphery of a huge city could be
>>  near to a small town in the neighborhood than to the place with the
>>  right city tag.
> 
> That's a concept very typical of a programmer: I can think of cases
> where the idea doesn't work, and from this follows that the idea is
> not an acceptable solution.
> 
> But let's not overlook that the idea works in the vast majority of
> cases! And in those few cases where City A's "Main St" is nearer to
> City B's place node than it is to City A's, I can always put an is_in
> tag.

Good evening everyone.

Well, the "correct" solution that also answers if a street is
NOT contained in a city would be so use the existing
place-tags on a polygon marking the actual
city/suburb/zip-code/state-limits.
this also gives a lot more information like "how big is this city",
"what city does this suburb belong to" and fits perfectly with
the existing country/state/zip-code and suburb-regions.

Note that this way of tagging is explicitely allowed in the
wiki (wich is the single place of reference for tagging. Other
then all of the mailing-lists that can disagree with each other.).

There is nothing wrong with having a single point labled
"place=village;name=XYZ" inside a polygon labeled
"place=village;name=XYZ" just to mark where the name shall be rendered.

This is also MUCH less work then using is_in and much less error-prone.
(Like when forgetting a piece of road or mistyping the city/suburb-name
in the tag.) You only have to draw this once (and use a large square
around all the streets if you do not know the exact limits) instead
of labeling endless numbers of roads and spliting up roads at the city-
limits.

Marcus
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