[Talk-in] Classifying places - cities, towns and villages

[Arun Ganesh]

>
> and still mean the same thing. When looking at a border area, say India
> and Nepal, it would be useful not to have the same tag mean different
> things on different sides of the border.


Let me cut my reply short and put forward a geographical query: Give me a
list of all cities in the world that has a population of over 200,000

We have two options:
1) Use the current tag definitions and continue to record metadata in an
inconsistent manner. Because place=city just means any place with more than
100,00 people, i cant get an answer to my query

2) Rethink the tag definitions so that metadata is recorded in a consistent
manner
If place=city actually meant that, a place with a city government, and
there is a population= tag which had the population value. Then I could
query the data in infinitely more ways and the dataset is more useful than
before.

Let me reiterate, the current standard, whatever it is or whoever defined
it, is arbitrary and it is that which shoehorns data into lumps of not very
useful clusters.

I believe in doing things right when we have the option. I'm a user of the
osm data and my interests lie in extending the utility of the dataset. If
you have a suggestion that could could answer my query, i'd like to hear it.

-- 
j.mp/ArunGanesh <http://j.mp/ArunGanesh>
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