[Tagging] Tagging Metropolis

[Steve Bennett]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 3:11 AM, M∡rtin Koppenhoefer
<dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> There is a proposal in the wiki by user: MojaveNC which doesn't look bad:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Metropolis

The problem of prominence affects a lot more than just cities. Adding
a single tag to handle a single case is thinking too small.

I suggest we investigate something like a general prominence=* tag,
with values of 1-10. Define some defaults, like:

1
2 Hamlet
3
4 Village
5
6 Town
7 National capital (if not bigger)
8
9 City
10

So if a town is more prominent than its tag would suggest, add
prominence=7. If a city is a "metropolis", add prominence=10. Or,
hell, prominence=11 for the mega-metropolises.

Remember how we recently had a discussion about how to tag airports?
Exactly the same problem. There will be many other examples, like
schools, parks, mountains etc etc. If we want to produce good
cartography, we need to be tagging for it.

We really need to be thinking about general solutions to these
problems, not solving tiny instances of the problem.

Steve