[OSM-talk] Nominatim & US places

[Greg Troxel]

Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net> writes:

> On 1/3/11 9:51 PM, Greg Troxel wrote:
>> Richard Welty<rwelty at averillpark.net>  writes:
>>
>> That may be true but Kurt is right.    For most towns in New England
>> there is a polygon for the boundary, and then a specific place, often an
>> intersection or a village green or a few streets that should properly be
>> labeled as a point.
>>
>> If having a polygon with the name and a point with the name as a
>> "populated place" produces two names on the map, then the rendering is
>> arguably broken.  It may be that if the town center point is in the map
>> view, the label should be put more or less there.
> there is an underlying data problem. the boundaries and center points
> are disconnected bits of data, and i would argue that it's not reasonable
> to demand that the rendering engines figure that relationship out.
>
> this is why i suggested adding a "centroid" tag to the boundary relations
> as a way to convey the place that is by convention considered the
> "center" of town. the existing gnis object for West Sand Lake, NY then
> can be
> placed in a boundary relation for West Sand Lake with a role of
> "centroid". now the rendering engine can just see if there's a centroid and
> use that, if not, it can compute its own. if it doesn't check for the
> centroid
> and computes its own anyway, that's really not particularly a failure, just
> not as nice as it could have been.

Sorry, I understand what you are saying now.   I thought you were
objecting to defining the traditional centers as redundant with
geometric centroid.  I now think you're saying that those should be part
of the boundary relation so that it's clear and easy to process with
less matching up that can go wrong with editing.

The word centroid seems best avoided.  It has a well established
geometrical meaning and that isn't what we mean.   admin_centre seems
fine for boundaries with admin_level tags.  Or just traditional_center
for any boundary relation.


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