[Tagging] Can OSM become a geospacial database?

[Paul Allen]

On Thu, Dec 6, 2018 at 4:38 PM Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com>
wrote:

> For example I would see the distinction between a hamlet and a village in
> a functional criterion, while in Europe it is often clear what is a town
> and what is a big village, from looking at the legal situation (history is
> usually important), it can be in the name / people usually know it.
>

In the UK, many many years ago, these distinctions applied:

To be a city the place had to have a cathedral.

To be a town the place had to have a market.

To be a village the place had to have a church.

To be a hamlet it didn't even have a church but did have more than one
dwelling.

The distinctions were never that hard and fast, and have only loosened over
time.  A city now has a
cathedral or a royal charter or a university or just feels like calling
itself a city.  A large village in England
can be larger than a large town in Wales.  Some towns no longer have
markets, but once did.
Some villages no longer have churches, but once did.  Etc.

I see that the wiki suggests using those terms as an indicator of
population rather than anything else.
Since some renderers assume those values are indicators of population,
maybe that's what we
should be using explicitly and drop the city/town/village/hamlet.  Except,
of course, population is often
left untagged (and is sometimes that information is simply not available).

The real world is messy.

-- 
Paul
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