[Tagging] [Talk-us] how to tag US townships?

[Peter Budny]

Antony Pegg <antthelimey at gmail.com> writes:

> tagging admin area / populated centers / labels in USA seems to come down to
> two main tags:
>
> admin_level and place

Before you over-simplify, let me point out a couple things:

1. Not all of the US is incorporated.  In the Northeast, every tiny part
of land is incorporated into a town or township or borough.  But in the
Southeast (and I presume elsewhere as well), there's lots of
unincorporated land, even in the vicinity of large cities.  Look at
Atlanta, which still has lots of unincorporated area.

That's a big variation, and the map needs to be equally competent at
handling both regions.

2. Defining how "important" a city is (and thus, how big its label on
the map should be) is a tricky thing to do.  Population is certainly a
large factor, but how do you define this?  The City of Atlanta is the
#33 most populous city in the US, with 540,000 people, but the Atlanta
metropolitan area is #9 with 5,475,000 people and is the largest metro
area in 800 miles.

There's also a recognition factor... the whole world knows where New
York is and would expect it to be fairly prominent on a map.  Capitol
cities are considered to be "important" even when they're not very
prominent or populous.  Etc.


It seems to me that admin_level handles the first point, except that 4
levels to cover all of the US doesn't give much granularity.  Maybe we
need to think about using the in-between levels to show more detail?

place= seems to be handling the second point, but not very well.  Should
label sizes really be determined purely by population?  By "importance"?
What criteria should there be?  I don't think the current scheme of
city/town/whatever is very good, because it's another instance of
hacking a British scheme onto a country with a very different history
and organization.
-- 
Peter Budny  \
Georgia Tech  \
CS PhD student \