[OSM-talk] Improving on the NGA placenames data

[Phil Endecott]

Hakan Tandogan wrote:
> On Tue, June 24, 2008 17:13, Phil Endecott wrote:
>> So I was wondering whether anyone here knows how I could improve on
>> this, i.e.
>>
>> - Is there an "improved" version somewhere with more ranking
>> information in it?
>
> www.geonames.org ? They aggregate lots of data sources and tend to have
> more "place" nodes in remote areas of the world.

Thanks; I'll have a look.  I thought it was basically the same as the 
NGA data.

>> - Is there equivalent data in the OSM database, with rankings of some
> sort, that I could extract a dump of?
>
> You could parse the is_in tags / relations.
>
> In general, you found one of our bigger unsolved problems ;-)

The slippy map seems to do a good-enough job of choosing which city 
names to display on a zoomed-out map.  How does it do that?


Phil.