[talk-au] Optimising map rendering for recreational use

[Li Xia]

Hey everyone, have an idea about map rendering and want to get your thoughts.

One of the challenges is in rendering a useful map for recreational use is displaying roads, tracks, trails and to some degree water lines at appropriate zoom levels in more remote regions where the density is lower compared with urban regions.

In my opinion, most map service online services or offline vector engine experience the same issue. Here are some illustrations of the issue, by comparing Google / OSM / Raster map of the same region:

Google

OSM

Raster map

As you can clearly see, at that zoom level, there's no deal on either OSM or Google maps, where as the raster map is useful. yes you can zoom in on Google or OSM, but with a smaller viewing port, orientation is more difficult and you loose that overview which is try handy for trip planning.

By using a tag specific for rendering purposes, this issue can be overcome. Rendering engines can take advantage of these tags to "optimise" rendering of various regions.

The tags are fairly self explanatory. By tagging a road with render_as:trunk, this feature can be rendered at the same zoom level as a trench road. Each class of road will have it's own tag so if a highway:territory should be rendered at the same zoom level as a primary, then tag render_as:tertiary.

What do you guys think?

Cheers 

Li.

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