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

[Alex Mauer]

Mike Collinson wrote:
> At 08:17 AM 3/01/2007, Alex Mauer wrote:
>
> 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?

Most maps that I've seen use the population or other information
(capital city, county seat/county town). Since "municipality" has no
intrinsic value itself, it is useful as a term encompassing all of the
above.

To me, "place=municipality, population=24000, function=capital,
designation=city" (where function and designation  are pretty much
pulled out of my ass -- but function would be capital/seat, and
designation is as defined by local law.) is more useful and informative
than "place=city".  Renderers can also better use that information to
determine the relative emphasis based on the area being rendered (e.g.
don't show cities with a  population below 100 000 when rendering the
entire country, unless it's the capital city...and then render it with a
star).

I also think that it fits better with the other places.  We don't have
place=state/province/prefecture, presumably since those are all
equivalent-level areas (for the US and others, Canada and others, and
Japan and others(?), respectively).  And I'm really unsure of the
distinction between "state" and "region" -- perhaps useful for China's
4-level divisions (country,province,prefecture,municipality)?

-- 
-Alex Mauer "hawke"
OpenPGP key ID: 0x51192FF2

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