[talk-au] Australian Rendering

[John Smith]

--- On Sun, 2/8/09, Darrin Smith <beldin at beldin.org> wrote:

> Completely a matter of opinion, and again the same thing
> could be said 
> about innumerable bits of data that don't fit into your
> perception of 
> what needs to be on the map.

The same argument could be made for UK v AU opinions of what a map looks like, it's obvious you are used to one way a map looks like and I'm used to another, additionally it seems we use maps differently which may make different things relevant.

> Are you sure they are not suburb boundaries? All over SA
> these very 
> cases you are talking about ARE suburb boundaries, nearly
> the whole 
> state (at least south of Goyder's Line) has 'suburbs'
> defined which as I 
> said before the ABS almost lives up to matching.

Now we're going into very subjective territory, a suburb to me is a section of a metro area, not a patch of dirt in the middle of no where with only a handful of people.

> So let me see if I get this correct, because you aren't
> used to maps 
> looking this way we should change the way the data is
> represented?

That's the entire point of the exercise, we all see maps differently, otherwise we'd be happy using the UK rendered maps.
 
> Ah, so there's a certain amount of 'tag for the renderer'
> happening here 
> also.

That's true for a lot of tags, otherwise roads would all look the same and wouldn't show differently to indicate the most used roads. This is all I'm really looking for, to differentiate areas into importance and labeling everything the same isn't descriptive enough.
 
> These are PLACE names not ABS names. They are quite often

So add a place tag, what would be less than hamlet?

> the 
> aggregation of several ABS areas into 1 for that coincide
> with a place. 

Actually it's not that simple, some areas are bigger than the boundaries some areas cover less than the boundaries.

> They are valid locations, they are valid suburb boundaries,
> in fact in 
> some areas ABS doesn't actually have all of place names
> that exist and 
> have boundaries.

They seem to be all named to me except non-incorporated areas which they list as unclassified.

> We should have no hesitation correcting ABS data because
> they don't 
> necessarily reflect individual ABS survey areas anyway.

What's wrong with it exactly?

> Franc put a lot of work into bringing them in, the list

Which I'm grateful for, it helps marking out things with low res sat imagery and you don't have to survey like rivers.