[talk-au] Filling in blank space (Was Re: Tagging towns by relative importance, not just population size)

[Little Maps]

Great work again Andrew, many, many thanks. I’m curious what process we could use to move forward on this. 

As I understand your message, we have and/or can get population data for a small proportion of places in Aus (probably with comprehensive data for most larger places and less data for the many smaller ones). This means that, if we develop a guideline based primarily on population data we then have to develop a simple way to extrapolate the guidelines to places without pop data. Yes?

As a simple starting point, I’m curious whether it’s possible to first try to get agreement on general cut-offs for villages/towns/cities etc using only the places that have pop data (i.e. those you’ve mapped). We could present some different scenarios so that everyone could see the implications of different decisions for areas that they know. 

If agreement can be reached on this, we could then try to develop a simple way to generate guidelines for places without population data. This might use township area as a proxy for population for example (or other features).

The overpass patterns you generated are great to see. I imagined that the OSM city/town division might have been based on features like whether a place had a hospital etc, as others have suggested. But your analysis suggests that we may just have major regional differences in what people consider to be towns vs cities. For example, lots of regional centres in Vic have been tagged as cities (and are indeed called ‘cities’ in Victoria), whereas many places of similar size in other states have been tagged as towns. That points to broad social/cultural differences between Victoria and other regions, rather than fine detailed factors at individual localities. It’s great to see this big picture view.

I’m happy to devote some time to the topic too if others think it’s a useful topic to progress. Thanks again, Ian