[Talk-us-massachusetts] place=square

[Greg Troxel]

"Alan & Ruth Bragg" <alan.ruth.bragg at gmail.com> writes:

> I'm planning to survey the locations on the ground in my area to see if
> they could be better represented in OSM as polygons with the place=square
> tag.

I think this is basically a good thing, but it feels very tricky.

1) I know the area quite well, but I'm not the least bit sure exactly
where I would draw a polygon for "Central Square" in Cambridge, or the
others.  Then there is "Monument Square" in Concord, which appears to be
the grass area and *not* the surrounding area, unless you are selling
real estate, in which case it's a big area.

2) square names and things like hamlet from the hierarchy of settlements
are really separate things, except that square names might also be
villages, or even towns if large.  Plus of course the settlement
hierarchy gets awkward when there is no empty space between populated
places.

3) In addition to squares which are well known as place names, there are
lesser-known names.  An example is "Wood Square" in Hudson, which refers
to the downtown, more or less, or perhaps one end of it.  I suspect only
real locals or history buffs know this.  As opposed to Harvard Square,
which everybody can tell you about where it is and nobody can draw a
line with chalk where you step out of it (or rather there would not be
any consensus).

4) Then there are squares named for fallen service members or
police/fire, similar to a Memorial Highway segment.  These are signed
and locally significant, but I don't think they function as place names,
but are more like a memorial.  So I would not be inclined to use
place=square for those, absent me understanding it much better.


So if you are talking about things like Harvard Square, and going to
take a crack at boundaries based on local knowledge and the definitions,
that sounds good to me.  I would be interested to have a look after you
do a few, and I suspect others would too.
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