[OSM-talk] Survey: Bad Map Rendering

[Richard Fairhurst]

Frederik Ramm wrote:

> I'd be happy to hear from you about such "areas of bad rendering",
> whether they are bugs in there renderer(s) or just things that are
> ugly for some reason.

Label placement (as Steve's flagged) and generalisation (i.e.  
stretching the geographical truth to convey the information you want)  
are the two old chestnuts for automated cartography.

The South Wales valleys are always a good case for generalisation:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.61&lon=-3.333&zoom=10&layers=B0FT

You have a narrow valley with (typically) one or two major roads, a  
railway, a river and a canal all crowded into it. How do you avoid  
them all ending up on top of each other at small scale?

There is a vast amount of prior research on both these topics, so  
your student would have a lot of reading to do, but yes, the  
crowdsourcing approach could really add something.

cheers
Richard