[OSM-talk] Mapnik: strange prioritisation/appearance of place names

[Elena of Valhalla]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Kærast <kaerast at qvox.org> wrote:
> We need to keep the village/town/city tags because it is important to
> know the official designation of a place, so what we need is a tag to
> designate how important the place is and therefore what zoom levels it
> shows on.  However, this would be tagging for the renderer and
> therefore considered by most to be inherently bad.

there are different degrees of "bad":

tagging a town as city so that it overrules a nearby, less important,
city is BAD

adding a clearly marked rendering hint like renderers:min_zoom is
somewhat bad, and definitely not elegant, but it wouldn't hurt much
any other use of OSM data

adding a relative importance tag that can be used by renderers to
select what is printed, but also e.g. by navigators in search results
isn't exactly good, since it is going to be somehow subjective, but it
isn't bad either.

finding a working algorithm that uses only objective data and is
always able to select the proper item to print would be excellent, but
also probably not feasible in real life.

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''

homepage: http://www.trueelena.org
email: elena.valhalla at gmail.com