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

M∡rtin Koppenhoefer dieterdreist at gmail.com
Wed Oct 20 17:06:52 BST 2010


2010/10/20 Peter Budny <peterb at gatech.edu>:
> 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.


good you mention this, there are similar cases in Europe. E.g.
Stuttgart counts 601.646 inhabitants, but the metropolitan area has
5.3 Million ranking 12th in Europe before Munich (5.2 Million
met.area, 1.33 million inhabitants city)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolregion#Die_gr.C3.B6.C3.9Ften_Metropolregionen_Europas

We already have had similar discussions on the German list, where the
result was to add as much detail as you can to help the rendering
application choose the one they are interested in.

The resulting matrix is here (in German, sorry):
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:Anzeige_von_St%C3%A4dten#Deutschland

The legend:

HS = Hauptstadt --- capital
MR = Metropolregion --- metropolitan region
F = Flughafen --- airport
H = Überseehafen --- harbour with overseas traffic
B = Bahnknotenpunkt --- important railway intersection
OZ = Oberzentrum --- main regional centre (?)
MZ = Mittelzentrum  --- medium regional centre (?)
Uni = University, one x per 10 000 students

another approach from the same page is titled "dominance" where
dominance expresses the distance to the next "higher" (in terms of
importance / population) place. The higher (in terms of distance) the
more dominant.

This serves to determine which names to show and which to omit. (in
scarse areas you would want to see also smaller places, but in
concentrated areas you will have to omit also big cities in favour of
even bigger (or more important according to a scheme like the above
described one) ones.

cheers,
Martin



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