[talk-au] Mapnik rendering of AU cities

[Stephen Hope]

I'm not positive, but I think that the very low zoom views don't
actually get a lot (any?) of their data from the live OSM data.
Rather they do, but they are only updated on very occasionally. There
is just too much data to be continually recreating tiles that large
from the main database.

The coastlines, for example, used to come from shapefiles from another
source, because we hadn't done our coasts. They now come mostly from
our database, but I think they are still extracted out every so often
and turned into shapefiles, not recreated on the fly for low zoom
levels.

Maybe the cities shown at low zoom levels come from something similar
- a list of major cities in each country or something? Sydney and
Canberra would be the biggest and the Capitol, so I could see that.
Or maybe they haven't updated these zoom levels since Melbourne was
added as a node?

In any case, ask on the talk list, where somebody who deals with the
low zoom levels is likely to see it.

Stephen

2008/12/4 Roy Rankin <rrankin at ihug.com.au>:
> With the discussion of places, I noticed that on the slippy map with the
> mapnik renderer, only the names of Sydney and Canberra appear on the
> 500km and 200km scales.
>
> I have looked at the tags for the Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne nodes;
> and I do not understand why Melbourne is not shown as I do not see any
> substantial differences in the tags. Wiki says that population can be
> used for rendering at different zooms, but Melbourne has 10 times the
> population of Canberra. Ideally, I would like to see names of all the
> major (state capital) cities in the whole of Australia view.
>
> As an aside, in the USA most of the major cities are not state capitals.
>
> Does anyone understand why Melbourne is not shown on the whole of
> Australia view?
>
> Regards,
> Roy Rankin
>
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