[OSM-talk] Response to A critique of OpenStreetMap
Ed Avis
eda at waniasset.com
Thu Oct 14 19:32:02 BST 2010
This guy has done us a useful service by producing this critique; although it
would surely be even better if he then made an OSM account, retagged all the
highways and administrative areas, and sent Mapnik style sheet patches to fix
all the rendering issues, I don't think we can complain that he hasn't. Just
pointing out the things to improve is helpful in itself.
Perhaps half of the things he mentions are rendering problems but the others
are data problems, where inconsistent tagging is used. In some cases some
standardization needs to happen within a country, such as the different highway
abbreviations in the USA, and in others a particular country's mappers might
consider a slightly different tagging scheme, as in the Venezuelan state names
that do not need 'Estado X' instead of plain 'X'.
The European administrative borders are an interesting question:
for example French regions show up with a thicker border than German states,
although according to the doc for 'admin_level' they should both be
admin_level=4.
<http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=47.095272&lon=-0.207947&zoom=18&layers=M>
shows one of these extra-thick borders, compare with
<http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=49.086359&lon=10.249004&zoom=18&layers=M>
But as far as I can tell, both borders have admin_level=4. Why do they
render differently?
--
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>
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