[Talk-GB] UK cities

[Andy Robinson]

IMO we should tag cities and towns as they are designated here and add a
population if possible to satisfy those that want to render places by
population size.

Cheers

Andy

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ed Loach [mailto:ed at loach.me.uk]
> Sent: 17 October 2011 10:48
> To: talk-gb at openstreetmap.org
> Subject: [Talk-GB] UK cities
> 
> I was watching the quiz show "Holding out for a Hero" last night on TV and
> one of the questions was how many cities are in the UK. The correct answer
> out of 26, 46 and 66 was 66. Sorry for the spoiler if anyone had recorded
it to
> watch later and couldn't have guessed.
> 
> However I idly wondered at the time how accurately UK cities are mapped.
> This morning, with the help of a Geofabrik British Isles extract and a
.poly file
> I created moments before finding the existing UK one on the Cloudmade
> website, I can confirm that we have 69. After finding an official list on
a UK
> Gov website[1] and
> comparing:
> 
> We are missing: Chichester, Lichfield, Ripon, Salford, St David's,
Stoke-on-
> Trent, and Westminster We have extra: Bournemouth, Chelmsford,
> Colchester, Ipswich, Jedburgh, Middlesborough, Milton Keynes,
> Northampton, Reading, and Swindon
> 
> I have a feeling that some of the extra ones have been tagged as cities
for
> the renderer as rendering of cities doesn't take into account area (of a
> node?) or population as far as I know.
> 
> Having said that, the Key:place wiki page[2] seems to suggest that the
> convention varies by countries with suggested tagging based on population
> for those countries that haven't established a convention. In other word
it
> fudges the issue because mappers disagree. Map Features[3] suggests
> "Urban settlement of national importance as defined by
> national/state/provincial government. May be state capital, provincial
capital
> or center of a metropolitan statistical area. Often over 100,000 people",
> which leans towards using official city definitions in countries where
those
> exist.
> 
> So currently, if someone wants a list of UK cities from OSM, they can't
get it
> by using osmosis to extract place=city nodes. Or they can, but they would
> find our data to be wrong.
> 
> So, should we correct the tagging of cities in the UK so people can
extract
> correct information? Discuss...
> 
> Ed
> 
> [1] http://is.gd/1dUxfR
> [2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place
> [3] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features#Places
> 
> 
> 
> 
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