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

Brian Quinion openstreetmap at brian.quinion.co.uk
Mon Mar 23 12:50:53 GMT 2009


On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 12:34 PM, David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:
> On 23/03/2009 12:13, Adam Schreiber wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Elena of Valhalla
>> <elena.valhalla at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
>> Population?  People can vote importance with their feet.
> Population's not enough. Some places "punch above their weight" - the
> example I like to use is Hay-on-Wye in Powys. It's under 2,000 people
> but is most clearly an important market town for the surrounding area.
> In population it would be a modest village, but it is more important
> than that.

I've been finding that the number of hotels (within the city area as
defined by builtup_area file) is a surprisingly effective method of
calculating the importance of a place, with the added advantage that
it is data already present in OSM.

It does suffer from the problem that not every mapper considers hotels
to be worth mapping, and that areas not mapped get an artificially low
importance - but in most cases it seems to work and will hopefully
improve with time.

--
 Brian




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