[OSM-talk] place=small_town

[David Earl]

On 27/11/2007 10:32, Tom Chance wrote:
> I think we should just admit that the way we want places rendered is
> quite complicated, that we won't get enough people to enter tags to
> cover every factor that we want to consider (official status,
> population, amenities, historic significance, etc.). We should just have
> a main tag for place type that conveys how it should be rendered, i.e.
> what type of place it is.

Absolutely. People who live in a place tend to know what kind of place 
they think it should be. Everyone in Hay-on-Wye (and indeed lots of 
similar places in the Welsh borders like Kington, Prestatyn, Llandindrod 
Wells) would call it a town, no one in Linton (3 times larger) or 
Sawston (4 times larger) would think of it as other than a village.

> If you look at a UK road atlas they tend to have various gradations:
> 
> * tiny village / hamlet (light, small black font)
> * large village or with services (heavy small black font)
> * small town (larger heavy black font)
> * important town (heavy yellow font on green background block)
> * city, metropololis (capitalised heavy yellow font on green background)
> 
> So really I think David's suggestion is more like
> place=important_town ;-)

Perhaps - certainly I think of Bedford (town) and Cambridge (city) as 
being on a par in how they should appear, and different from nearby St 
Neots (pop 29,000, definitely a town, but not in the same league as 
those two)

But the place where I feel the need to distinguish most is in the mid 
thousands - 2,500 - 10,000 people. I wouldn't want to classify St Neots 
in with Linton, 7 times smaller. In the hundreds of people, we're almost 
always talking about a village, but I'd be reluctant to lump those in 
with hamlet where we're talking well under a hundred.

So maybe I want both
   small_town or large_village
AND
   large_town or important_town

Or maybe I'm wanting a
   place_prominence=1..10
or some such.

population=N isn't enough (c/f Hay on Wye), though maybe it could be if 
used in conjunction with the existing place tags, so
   place=town, population > 50,000 is rendered more prominently than 
other towns; and
   place=village, population > 2,500 is rendered more prominently than 
other villages.

David