[Talk-us] Parks, etc. Points or outlines

[Toby Murray]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 9:02 PM, John F. Eldredge <john at jfeldredge.com> wrote:
> Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 4/24/2012 2:38 PM, Josh Doe wrote:
>> > Yes, there should be only one feature for each real world object,
>> and
>> > the way/multipolygon has more spatial information, however the nodes
>> > might have other useful information like the GNIS feature ID.
>>
>> For this matter, why are there county nodes all over the U.S.? They
>> don't seem to have come from GNIS:
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/316947053/history
>>
>
>
> One possibility is that they come from mappers using programs that can create POIs, but lack the ability to create ways.  Many cell phone mapping apps have this limitation.

No, they were imported. The import left them all on the extreme
eastern and often southern corner of the county. I have moved a lot of
them to approximately the center.

I think the reason they exist is the same reason why cities always
have a node in addition to their administrative boundaries. And
states/countries too far that matter. Most renderers render the name
from the nodes, not the admin boundaries. The reason I started moving
the county nodes is that I saw the county name labels were in odd
locations on Mapquest Open. Not saying this is ideal... but that's the
way things are at the moment.

But most features do render from boundary ways/relations. So in the
case of parks, definitely only the outline is needed.

Toby