[OSM-talk-be] place=city, place=town

[Ben Laenen]

Mathias Versichele wrote:
> Am I the only one that thinks it's a little 'artificial' to base the
> difference between a 'place=city' and 'place=town' on the population
> (>100.000 and <100.000 resp.) ? Right now a lot of cities (one example:
> Dendermonde) are tagged as towns, which doesn't combine well with the
> administrative reality...

It's an artificial and arbitrary categorization, indeed, as it's just using 
the international rules here. Due to way this tag is used, it's the only thing 
we can do here: take the international rules which are based on population 
more or less, with small adjustments to the Belgian situation. So we cannot 
use them for symbolic things like whether a municipality has city rights. Our 
map would become a big mess if we started to map all places with city rights 
as city.

When we get more data we could start using tags like population to render 
places on the map, and tags to denote special status like city rights or 
whether it's a capital etc., although I wonder if there's really any need for 
a special rendering for places with city rights on a normal map.

> Oh, and I repeat the same question I posted earlier: has anyone thought of
> contacting natuurpunt ?

If nobody replies then the answer is probably no :-) I don't know anyone who 
has.

Ben