[Tagging] city/settlement importance -- WAS [OSM-talk] The biggest violation of OpenStreetMap, ever.

John Willis johnw at mac.com
Wed Jul 16 13:08:29 UTC 2014


> institutions in charge of determining these figures 


What about things that are well known in a country? The "one hundred mountains ofJapan" is a common list known to residents, and the "three famous mountains of gunma" are also labeled and known by the prefecture where I am (which means several million residents know of the three, so having them more prominently labeled over their unknown neighbors is highly beneficial to the map we are making. 

Every time I read about map making, I hear about how important including and excluding things are - I always want to make the map better, but how do we provide that in database form without some kind of rank? 

Do we do it on a tag basis - ditch, drain, canal, stream, river are all variations on path for water, but mountain gets no hill/ peak/ mount/ caldera/ sub-peak separation. I have lots of drains that could be streams, and ditches that could be drains, but a choice has to be made.

If we trust users to tag businesses, shops, cities, roads, and bridges, why can't we trust them to know their area better than we do?

I'm still waiting to correctly show mountains vs hills, the technical prominence stuff be dammed. 
We are serving an inferior map without properly labeled geographic features that vary with the zoom level - like every other map does.  I'd like to help fix that.

There has to be a way to "crowd source" prominence of things  - I thought that is what these wiki based projects were all about. It just may not be *easily* verifiable, but there are lists made and official government rankings done for many things in many places.


Javbw 

Sent from Japan

> On Jul 16, 2014, at 3:15 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 2014-07-15 19:47 GMT+02:00 Janko Mihelić <janjko at gmail.com>:
>> Making a rank or importance attribute is entirely subjective. It might as well be a tag like importance:according_to:Bob=5.
>> If it was objective, then there could be a number like annual_number_of_tourists=350000 or annual_number_of_pilgrims=1400000. For economic importance some other figure, a number nobody can refute.
> 
> 
> while I agree somehow, the algorithm might be so complex that you'd have to put a very long list of tags to the object and there might be stuff that is hardly puttable into tags, but might still be verifiable. Also figures like annual_number_of_tourists or annual_number_of_pilgrims are not verifiable by the small on the ground mapper, and institutions in charge of determining these figures might be tempted to cheat in order to appear more important, so there will always remain some doubt ;-)
> 
> 
> cheers,
> Martin
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