[Talk-ca] Lowzooms + Cleanup of place names in western Canada

[Jason Reid]

James Ewen wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 2:37 AM, Jason Reid
>  <osm at bowvalleytechnologies.com> wrote:
>
>  >  I've also gone through and started fixing/reclassifying places that were
>  >  imported from the GNS import last fall, since most places didn't have
>  >  enough data and got labelled as towns. So far I've gotten AB and SK
>  >  done, and MB will probably get done by mid week.
>
>  Is there a significance to all the tags associated with these points?
>  There are a couple pages of tags, which aren't in the list of official
>  tags. I would assume that these extra tags are just there for user
>  information. Is there some information included that defines the size
>  of the text associated, and the zoom level the labels show up at?
>  Zooming into Edmonton, you see the names of bedroom communities in the
>  50,000 population range before you see the name Edmonton, a community
>  of about 500,000.
>
>  I am currently working on mapping Strathcona County just east of
>  Edmonton, which contains a point labeled Strathcona, which is
>  positioned just north of the hamlet of Ardrossan. I renamed it to
>  Strathcona County, but looking at the lat/long information included,
>  it looks like it actually should be a point describing an area in
>  Edmonton. Strathcona was a town located at the north end of the CPR
>  line, south of the North Saskatchewan River, before the City of
>  Edmonton was incorporated. It still is the name of the neighborhood in
>  Edmonton.
>
>  Also, there are a couple of these GNS points within Strathcona County.
>  Sherwood Park is labeled as a town. Ardrossan is labeled as a town.
>  Josephburg is labeled as a village. North Cooking Lake is labeled as a
>  village. All of these communities are hamlets within the specialized
>  municipality of Strathcona County.
>
>  Also, Edmonton, Saint Albert, and Sherwood Park have a grey background
>  at zoom levels 8, 9, and 10. Where can I find this background defined
>  in the map?
>
>  http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.5&lon=-113.5&zoom=10
>
>  James
>
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>   

Any  of the fields that are in the gns: namespace were simplyfields from 
the master dataset that were present from the import. Really the only 
fields that are needed are the place=(town|city|village|suburb) and then 
name= to display the name. If a name was a former town, which I've ran 
into a few times in Calgary for the towns of Forest Lawn, Bowness and 
Ogden are now part of the city, probably just change it to place=suburb 
which will render at a much higher zoom level only. Cases such as places 
within Strathcona county are currently set how they were simply because 
if they are all rendered as their official legal status they won't show 
up. Fort MacMurray is like this as well, since technically the city of 
Fort MacMurray doesn't exist in any legal status but thats what its 
referred to still. It's a judgement call that most maps have had to make.

As for cases where the name isn't showing, thats most likely due to the 
render engine detecting that the text may overlap, often the case at 
lower zooms. Things like moving the place= node for Edmonton around may 
get it rendering properly.

The grey background that shows on the zoom8-10 on the mapnik isn't 
actually coming from the osm data itself, rather from another dataset 
that is used by mapnik that also contains the older vmap0 coastline data 
that is slowly being phased out.

-- 
-----------------------------
 Jason Reid

 Web Technical Administrator
 Faculty of Social Sciences
 University of Calgary

 Social Sciences 515
 403-220-7903
-----------------------------