[Tagging] Topographic place names

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2013/12/12 Andrew Guertin <andrew.guertin at uvm.edu>

> Many villages or other small human settlements have no clearly defined
> boundaries, and we just represent them as a node.
>


IMHO big human settlements are more difficult than small ones when it comes
to define their edges. You can represent (from a data model point of view)
every place as an area in OSM, nodes are a somehow preliminary solution
(and good to indicate a central point which might often not be the
geometrical center).



> Similarly, many objects (say, shops) DO have clearly defined boundaries,
> but only have a node in OSM. In both cases, it's understood that the thing
> is an area, and the node means "it's somewhere around here".
>


shops can also be represented by areas (see above, preliminary), and a lot
of people already do it (see http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/shop )


>
> Those are common examples of nodes representing fuzzy objects, and I see
> no reason that a way couldn't also be fuzzy. Just as with nodes, it would
> be up to the consumer to either understand the level of fuzziness, ignore
> the feature entirely, or pass it through and let a human interpret it.
>


a node isn't a nice representation of a geographical region, as it doesn't
convey information about topology (region inside region, boundaries between
regions etc.).

cheers,
Martin
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