[OSM-talk] Square (Place, Platz,Piazza, Plaza, …)

mbranco mbranco2 at gmail.com
Mon Jan 2 12:16:21 UTC 2017


Following are personal thoughts, I'd like to discuss them and discover if it
could be a general issue (not only for my country, Italy).

*Premise*

 -  Squares are urban areas, whose perimeter is drawable with a single
closed way.
 -  These areas have an official name.
 -  The old and very basic paper maps show always at least two elements, for
towns/cities: streets and squares (and related names, if they are big enough
to show them too).
 -  Inside square areas there could be a lot of different things: highways,
monuments, buildings, flowerbeds, … : attributes of the square must refer to
all the area, not only a part (relevant or not) of it.
 -  I prefer think that practicability could be one of the (optional)
attribute of a square, not the opposite: square is not an (optional)
attribute of the practicability --> i.e. highway=pedestrian + area=yes .
 -  highway=pedestrian + area=yes could not mean “square”: there are a lot
of pedestrian areas, for example in parks, that are not squares.
 -  Practicability inside a square is fully described by all the highways
inside it, the two kind of information (for square and for practicability)
can be fully disjointed (for the square with nothing inside and fully
pedestrian,  the square area and the pedestrian area coincide).

*Request*

    Please render the place=square tag (or a new tag, whatever you prefer).
/
“Place” is already widely used (and rendered) for urban areas: borough ,
suburb, quarter, neighbourhood, city_block, ... ; it’s not widely used for
squares because it’s not rendered!/

*Hints*

 - Maybe rendering could use a semi-transparent color and square name could
be evidenced, as it’s already done e.g. for landuse=military [1] (a common
landuse in urban areas).
 -  Names of the highways inside the square which are identical to the name
of the square could be omitted [2] (just only in the rendering, of course).
 -  Another example of possible rendering is here [3] .

 
*
Hopes*

 -  Mappers could avoid to put highway=pedestrian + area=yes in squares like
this one [4] .
 -  Mappers which don’t like the previous solution but nevertheless think
that it’s useful to read the square name in the rendering, could stop to
assign arbitrarily the square name to the marketplace, or to the parking
area, or to the flowerbed, or to any other item inside the square [5].
 - Extraction tools as Osmfilter or Overpass could do selections related to
squares, street-guide tools as MapOSMatic could produce better outputs.

Thank you for your attention, cheers and Happy New Year!  

     Marco

[1] http://osmele.elilan.com/squares/landuse_military.jpg
[2] http://osmele.elilan.com/squares/PiazzaRebubblicaNEW2.jpg
[3] http://osmele.elilan.com/squares/torino_zoom16NEW2.jpg
[4] http://osmele.elilan.com/squares/PiazzaRepubblica_night.jpg
[5] http://osmele.elilan.com/squares/wrongSquares.jpg



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