[OSM-talk] Place: city,town,village,hamlet,suburb

[Mike Collinson]

At 08:17 AM 3/01/2007, Alex Mauer wrote:
>Since the distinction among these place-types is so varied throughout
>the world, is it even useful or could it be better served by having
>place="municipality" replacing all of those?
>
>On a personal note I found the word "Town" to be confusing, but that
>seems to be due to my specific location and the unusual terminology used
>there. [1] I think I'll just have to suck it up and deal with it.

As the primary intent of Place: city,town,village,hamlet,suburb is to 
decide whether whether to annotate a map with the locality and the 
relative emphasis to be placed (e.g. text size), "municipality" has 
no value and might be better placed in a separate tag describing the 
exact civic status of a locale?

This is rather like the debate on highways.  Everyone knows what a 
"main road" or a "town" is when they see one, but it is extremely 
hard to *precisely* define a) for global use b) in a manner that 
makes recording easy.  While lacking elegancy, general flexible tags 
are important.

Mike
Manila