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

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

On Wednesday 03 January 2007 05:35, Robert T Wyatt wrote:
> Without having been part of the defining discussions, it seems to me
> that these terms are intended to inform a map renderer about population
> and so the monikers are arbitrary

I really think we want to avoid conflating different data here. In the UK at 
least there is the official classification (metropolis, city, town, village, 
hamlet, I think) and the population and the two are related but not 
identical. For instance, Reading is always vying for city status but since 
losing a large chunk of its "official" population to Wokingham after some 
political boundary changes the local council is struggling to make the case.

But then St Albans, St Davids and other British cities are really too small 
and unimportant to show up on high-level zooms, even though they do so at the 
moment on the mapnik maps.

If we can get both the official classification, some useful indication of 
their relative importance for map renderers, and their population then so 
much better :)

Regards,
Tom

-- 
The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
 - Kundera