[OSM-talk] List: Densely Mapped Areas

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

colliar wrote:
>> I am not willed to map every tree in the forest or ever sand grain in
>> the dessert to compete in this list.

On 25.05.2013 16:28, Simon Poole wrote:
> I believe you fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of the list,
> higher up is not "better".

;)

The real purpose for me to make such lists is for my own use; when I set 
up tile servers, I often pre-render the world from zoom levels 0 to 12, 
and then I pre-render some parts of the world on 13+, namely those that 
are densely mapped - assuming that the densely mapped areas are usually 
also those that people are interested in.

There used to be a time when the densely mapped areas were, mostly, city 
centres of all kind, or other areas that people were very interested in 
(and that would therefore be likely to be viewed, so it made sense to 
pre-render them).

It isn't like that any more - among the most densely mapped areas on the 
planet there are many that not many people are interested in. When I 
drew up the list and zoomed in to some of the regions, there was a 
noticeable delay as our tile server was rendering the images that I 
requested - because, I can only assume, I was the first in a long-ish 
time to request them.

Still it makes sense to pre-render these very dense areas because they 
are the ones that, if requested on the fly, will be exceptionally slow ;)

Also, I thought that the list might be of interest to those test-driving 
a new renderer or editor, because before too long every area on the 
planet will look like these in OSM - so you better test-drive your 
software on those.

Is it "good" to be at the top in that list? In my eyes, if such a 
densely mapped area has an active community that has surveyed or at 
least procured and curated all that data, then they deserve our utmost 
respect for it. But they would deserve the same respect if they had only 
created half as much data ;) on the other hand, if an area is at the top 
and the person who imported the data doesn't even know the name of the 
place then well - nice looking map but not really an achievement to be 
proud of.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"