[talk-au] place=?

[Matt White]

Hugh Barnes wrote:
> Hi
>
> I entered some towns recently. I got stuck wondering whether they were 
> actually towns, villages, or hamlets.
>
> I think Australia applies different criteria to determine this designation. If 
> you follow the guidelines at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place, it 
> seems to allow a village to have up to 10,00 people! Can you see where this is 
> going? That may be a small place in more populous countries, but I'd certainly 
> call it a town.
>
> So remoteness seems to count for something.
>
> Any other criteria you can think of?
>   
I was doing the same thing last night - playing around with "towns" like 
Daly Waters, Wiluna, Fitzroy Crossing and a few others in the middle of 
WA. Most of these places probably only have a couple of hundred 
residents, but they are also the only towns for some considerable 
distance (I think the next town to Wiluna is Newman - probably > 100 km 
away.

This is me dreaming, cos I know sweet fa about the mapnik rendering 
process, but what would be cool would be some process where a 
town/village/hamlet is rendered at higher zooms based on the distance to 
the next closest town/village/hamlet - that way, Wiluna would get 
rendered at zoom 6 or 8, making it actually possible to find on the map 
visually. (As a excercise for the reader, try locating it now - use the 
osmarender tiles - it's not that easy.)