[Tagging] how to tag US townships?

[Peter Budny]

Alex Mauer <hawke at hawkesnest.net> writes:

> On 10/20/2010 01:43 PM, M∡rtin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>> I guess that Tübingen is more known to the average German then
>> Reutlingen, but that's just a guess. As written before, traditionally
>> cartographers gave more importance to Tübingen, while in current
>> automated internet cartography Tübingen looses almost always against
>> Reutlingen. Maybe this is a reflection of a changed interpretation of
>> importance but I fear it is simply a loss in quality...
>
> Probably a bit of both.
>
> Some more complicated set of heuristics for scoring the prominence of
> a place would definitely be useful here (and everywhere).
>
> It all depends upon what one wants to emphasise on a map.
>
> One possible course of action would be to update the renderers to use
> population (or a more complicated system) and then deprecate the
> place=* tag for municipalities.  (place=island and place=islet
> obviously aren’t relevant to this discussion).
>
> Perhaps we need to shift the discussion to actually figuring out a
> better replacement for place=*?

I think you've hit the nail on the head.  This discussion seems to have
highlighted the inadequacy of place=* for deciding label size and
prominence, since there are so many factors that go in to those
decisions, and the factors change depending on the particular kind of
map you're trying to create.

As complicated as it sounds, I think Martin may be on the right track: a
relation (or node) containing statistics (population, area, number of
universities, number of university students, number of airports, number
of harbors, whether it's a national/state capitol, whether it's a
highway control city, whether it's a "global" city, etc.) which
renderers can plug in to a formula that will give them a score to
determine how it wants to render each label.
-- 
Peter Budny  \
Georgia Tech  \
CS PhD student \