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

[Kristian Thy]

On Wed, Jan 03, Leszek Jakubowski wrote:
> The question is if we want to display villages/towns/cities in the
> government aspect (according to local law) or in some unified aspect
> (population seems to be usually used on most maps). Laws may be very
> different (take Finland and UK, AFAIR it takes 3 houses to make a town
> in finland, and it's done automaticly while in UK you need a bill to
> turn some houses into a town and only 3 houses probably wouldn't
> qualify)

In Denmark, the only thing resembling an official designation is that
any residential area (defined as areas with less than 200m between
houses, unless separated by parks, cemeteries, roads or the like) with a
population in excess of 200 is called a town.

We also had the concept of "købstæder" (~boroughs), but this is only
used historically now, with the last vestige of actual law applied to
these being rescinded in 1970.

As a result, any use of town/village/hamlet in Denmark is solely aimed
at rendering, not as an attempt to embed any implicit information about
amenities and so on. Any UKians trying to infer these from Danish tagged
cities will likely be confused and/or disappointed.

Separating population (or other physical attributes) from legal
attributes would make sense IMO.

\\kristian
-- 
Cthulhu.call();