[talk-au] Australian Rendering

Darrin Smith beldin at beldin.org
Mon Aug 3 02:54:44 BST 2009


John Smith wrote:
> 
> 
> --- On Sun, 2/8/09, Darrin Smith <beldin at beldin.org> wrote:
> 
>> In 95% of cases they're close enough, are you going to
>> throw out the baby with the bath water and dispose of the
>> cases where people have adjusted them to be correct? Even in
>> the places where they aren't they're the closest we're going
>> to get for a long time.
> 
> What about the 90% of Australia that isn't metro areas and these boundaries are all over the place and don't line up with towns, 

They still provide general enough information to be useful.
That same 90% also has a large number of source=landsat (or similar)
roads on them, which aren't very accurate either, perhaps we could
remove them also since they're just clogging things up? ;)

> they're usually smaller or larger depending if the town grew

So they need 'fixing' this doesn't make them invalid.

> they also appear all over the place in rural areas where there is no 
town.

Just because there's no town doesn't mean there's no designated name for
an area. There are over 30 documented place names on Kangaroo Island for
example, most of which aren't actual towns, yet they all have definite
boundaries - if anything the ABS source data is *lacking* in the number
of rural names it should be showing, ABS only provided about 20 in the
case of KI.

> It's the last point that I found them just noise they don't provide any meaningful information in rural areas, other than being boundaries for the ABS.

Really? I've found them immensely useful already in discovering towns I
never knew existed, or where towns I only know the name of are located.

Still it's your map render so you can hide them all you want, just
please don't push this case into the main OSM rendering.

> I realise there is a need to show town and suburb boundaries. One way would be to elevate them to admin_level=9, another would be to alter the boundaries in rural areas to a lower admin_level. Either way the amount of work needed would be about the same.

admin_level = 10 is already established as the suburb boundary and
documented as such.

Given the boundaries you are talking about are often serveral ABS areas
merged into one (all those that fall inside that suburb/town) there is
not need for an extra layer. You just need to recognise that the
boundaries are in the wrong place and need to be moved to the new place.

Darrin





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