[OSM-talk] capitols

[Robert T Wyatt]

Adam Schreiber wrote:
> On 6/12/07, David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:
>> I think you are mixing up capital (the status of the city) and capitol
>> (the typically domed building which is the administrative building for
>> the state)
> 
> I understand the difference quite well.  In the original post by RTW,
> he doesn't specify he wants to discuss buildings, so naturally I wrote
> about the cities themselves.

I just double-checked the dictionary (both M-W and OED):

capitol: the building or group of buildings
Capitol: national or state capitol building
capital: head town or city of a country, province, or state

Now, what I was originally thinking was that Austin, TX (capital of
the state) doesn't have a city marker and I wanted to add one and
designate it as the state capital. I thought I would be clever and add
the node right on top of the capitol building. I see that the tricky
part may be getting consensus on the implementation! For instance, if
I use the location of the capitol building to mark the capital city,
it could cause problems if renderers expect cities and buildings to be
mutually exclusive nodes, which I suppose is reasonable.

I also would want renderers to use something like a circled star as
the symbol for the state capital (the city), perhaps black for a state
capital and red for a national capital. I'm still looking for an open
source image for this icon.

Here's what I'm thinking for my city node:

<tag k="place" v="city">
<tag k="name" v="Austin">
<tag k="capital" v="yes">
<tag k="population" v="656,562">

... and then for the (separate) building node:

<tag k="building" v="capitol">
<tag k="name" v="Texas State Capitol">

Do you see obvious omissions in this mark-up (tags worth having here)?

I think that having:
<tag k="place" v="capital">
instead of:
<tag k="capital" v="yes"> (implies there is a "no" value to this key)
... makes sense.
(in fact, I would suggest that the values be state_capital |
national_capital --in case renderers wish to treat them differently)

Then having:
<tag k="building" v="capitol">
... becomes almost a necessary analogy.