[OSM-talk] Hierarchy of places

[Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists)]

There aren't that many cities with duplicate/multiple names. So I'd guess a
wiki page where they are listed and the community decides a stacking order
would be straightforward enough. Obviously doing it at lower levels this
approach wouldn't work. Info can then be tagged and used by namefinder?

Cheers

Andy

>-----Original Message-----
>From: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org [mailto:talk-
>bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of David Earl
>Sent: 28 November 2008 11:15 AM
>To: osm
>Subject: [OSM-talk] Hierarchy of places
>
>The discussion of finding Paris Ontario equated to Paris France just now
>reminds me to raise again the granularity of our place hierarchy.
>Notwithstanding value judgements people make about what is a "town", not
>just based on population, I still think we need some more levels in the
>city - town - village - hamlet hierarchy.
>
>I could use population in the namefinder (and ditto for caption size,
>priority etc in renderers) if that were given more widely, but the
>problem is that in the UK at least this information is subject to crown
>copyright (I assume any one figure is a fact, and therefore not
>copyright, but the collection is database copyright).
>
>I think we could do with a richer hierarchy something like this:
>metropolis    > 500,000
>city          > 100,000
>large_town    > 25,000? 40,000?
>town          > 10,000
>small_town / large_village > 2,500
>village       > 100
>hamlet        < 100
>
>I'm sure we can argue about the names and numbers, but I don't think
>that's too important as people will always bring their own local
>knowledge to bear as well, not least based on what the place chooses to
>call itself. For example, Hay-on-Wye (Y-Gelli), Powys is most definitely
>a town even though it has fewer than 2,000 people, but Linton,
>Cambridgeshire is a "village" of nearly 5,000 souls.
>
>Another possibility is to make judgements about "importance" based on
>land area. I think this would be hard, though not completely impossible,
>to infer automatically from the data, but I wonder if a "radius" value
>on the place might help - "a circle approximately this big would enclose
>the place". Perhaps over-exaggerates coastal settlements and others
>which aren't blobs, so can only be a coarse judgement, but it might help
>me in deciding what "in" and "near" mean in the context of searches,
>especially for places which "punch above their weight".
>
>David
>
>
>
>
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