[OSM-talk] using areas and/or nodes for citys/towns, car parks, etc.?

[Gernot Hillier]

Good morning!

On the German talk list we currently have a discussion how esp. citys,
towns & friends should be tagged (see
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-de/2007-December/005649.html).

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Map_Features#Places says that
one can use nodes or (/and?) areas for marking such objects.

To me, it looked like having an area for a city is much more precise
than a simple node, especially taking into account routing software
having to decide whether a street is in a city.

The current situation seems to be, however, that Osmarender renders such
areas correctly (i.e. renders the town name in the map), while Mapnik
seems to currently ignore such areas - names won't be rendered if you
don't have a node for it.

The result of this seems to be that people do quite different tagging
here in DE - some use both a place area and a place node for a city,
some combine a place node with a landuse area, etc.

So I wonder whether you have some common understanding here which we
finally can put to the Wiki to make this hopefully clearer.

Finally coming to car parks: here, the Mapping_Features wiki page is
even more interesting. The description says "Only nodes will get a
parking symbol. Areas will be colored." - while the Example image shows
both - an area and a symbol suggesting that both were used. However,
some people claimed that the name of the car park may be rendered twice
if you use the "name" tag for the area and the node.

Any input greatly appreciated!

Should this be not the correct place to discuss such issues, please
don't hesitate to point me to the right one!

--
Gernot