[OSM-talk] road classes

[Richard Fairhurst]

Lars wrote:

> Does anybody know exactly which roads are displayed as thin purple
> lines in scale 1:200,000 and 1:500,000 of MultiMap.com ?

1:200k and 1:500k on Multimap are Collins Bartholomew raster products:
http://www.bartholomewmaps.com/europe_scene_test.htm

I believe they're "hand-drawn" to an extent - i.e. the maps are output  
from Illustrator or Freehand, or similar, though probably using  
MAPublisher as an interface to a GIS back-end. However, there's  
clearly a huge amount of human design involved. (The label placement,  
for example, is too good for automation.) Bartholomew's product page  
expressly states that these maps are "created by cartographers".

In comparison, Google Maps and some of the other Multimap scales are  
entirely automated, produced by a set of rules from GIS data (a bit  
like our Osmarender maps).

Consequently, I'd expect that the 'missing road' is probably more a  
result of human error and/or choice than anything else.

cheers
Richard