Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City (again, sorry!)
On 2014-04-24 11:57, SomeoneElse wrote: > 2) We need some way to represent ceremonial city, if it's not to be > "place=city" Sure, if you want uk_legal_status=city then go ahead and add > that. "designation=city" perhaps? Isn't that what the "designation" tag is supposed to be for? As long as this is about qualifying a "place" (node or area). When it comes to administrative boundaries, it's different, as a "city council" is nothing special - it's just a honorific title that some councils (county, district or parish) may have acquired. The "designation" tag is already in use for admin boundaries to indicate the formal type of council (county? parish? london borough?) so I would suggest a simple "city=yes" or (better, IMHO) council_style=city to make it clear that it is only a name, as far as local government is concerned. I am working on a consolidated overview of tagging for UK admin boundaries which includes this provision: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Csmale/ukboundaries In some places the city status is not held by any council, but by charter trustees (Bath, for example). The boundaries may or may not correspond to extant administrative boundaries. Colin ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City (again, sorry!)
Tom Hughes wrote: On 22/04/14 13:29, SomeoneElse wrote: 1) "place=city" in OSM might or might not not mean the same as "is a ceremonial city, as defined in the UK" There is no "might" about it. The wiki at least is explicit: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place%3Dcity Absolutely - and the wiki's said that since Mike Collinson first wrote the page ages ago. By "might or might not" I was trying to summarise the previous email discussion. 2) We need some way to represent ceremonial city, if it's not to be "place=city" Sure, if you want uk_legal_status=city then go ahead and add that. "designation=city" perhaps? Isn't that what the "designation" tag is supposed to be for? Cheers, Andy ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City (again, sorry!)
If you want to know population, we should use a population tag. Given its history, much as we might like to pretend otherwise, place=city etc really *is* no more than an arbitrary hint to the renderer, and not much good either because it doesn't reflect the other criteria that would determine how prominent a place appears on a map. And of course those criteria would differ depending on what and who the map is for. Until there is another more diverse way of working out prominence, we'll keep going round in circles on this one. Current definition notwithstanding, I think I favour the place value being what people locally say the place is - if they think they are a city, then by the "what you see on the ground" method of mapping, that is what it is. But how the place (label in particular) is represented on a map ought to be up to that renderer, probably based on some weighted average of various criteria, perhaps including that local subjective judgement, the population bracket, home of an important institution, ... For example, on car maps I think there's an argument for bumping up the prominence of the set of place names used on green/blue (trunk/motorway) road signs in the UK, because of their usefulness in navigation. Scotch Corner is useful in this respect, but tiny (is it even a village?). David ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City (again, sorry!)
On 22/04/14 14:10, Ed Loach wrote: There is no "might" about it. The wiki at least is explicit: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place%3Dcity But has also had the meaning pretty much redefined in 2013 from how I understood it to be before then. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Tag:place%3Dcity&old id=812669 Well I don't think the old definition was particularly sensible since it pretty much invites getting very different results in different places. Even the old rules had a caveat to try and stop local legal status being applied indiscriminately though, the "Should normally have a population of at least 100,000 people and be larger than nearby place=towns" rule. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City (again, sorry!)
> There is no "might" about it. The wiki at least is explicit: > > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place%3Dcity But has also had the meaning pretty much redefined in 2013 from how I understood it to be before then. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Tag:place%3Dcity&old id=812669 Ed ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City (again, sorry!)
On 22/04/14 13:29, SomeoneElse wrote: 1) "place=city" in OSM might or might not not mean the same as "is a ceremonial city, as defined in the UK" There is no "might" about it. The wiki at least is explicit: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place%3Dcity "Smaller charter cities should normally be tagged using place=town to avoid these places being promoted too highly in gazetteer search results" That's using US terminology but it's basically the same thing, that you shouldn't base place=city on the local legal status. 2) We need some way to represent ceremonial city, if it's not to be "place=city" Sure, if you want uk_legal_status=city then go ahead and add that. 3) There's also a "subjective local importance" factor (Cambridge > Bedford was mentioned) Agreed. The wiki says largest, but I think a degree of "importance" is relevant as well. 4) A scheme that coincided with what's done globally would be preferred over anything UK specific. Absolutely, which is why the definition is not tied to the legal niceties of specific jurisdictions. 5) We need to decide on something and document it. Well I think it already is documented, just people in the UK are trying to ignore the documentation. I'd have expected any mass-change of cities and towns in the UK and Ireland to at least try and discuss the change beforehand, which didn't happened (someone on #osm-ie has already said that the changes to Galway and Waterford were not correct according to their understanding). I may be over-paranoid, but the description of the Wolverhampton change above as "town (near city)" does suggest that there's a certain amount of "for the renderer" going on here too. Well there is a close correspondence between the agree meaning of city as the largest/most important places and what places people would expect to show up first on the map so while it may be mapping for the renderer it's also in agreement with the documented meaning of the tag. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City
Formal UK City status may be held by a council (can be borough/district/unitary/parish) or by Charter Trustees. I am working on some kind of normalisation in the tagging for administrative areas and I am proposing to reflect the formal city/town status in the council_style=* tag, to show what the council is entitled to call itself. This gives a way to tag the formal status orthogonally to the perceived importance (based on population or whatever) of the "place", except where the city status is held by Charter Trustees. Work-in-progress (comments welcome) on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Csmale/ukboundaries Colin On 2014-02-25 14:46, David Earl wrote: > On 25 February 2014 13:39:50 GMT, Tom Hughes wrote: > >> The question that needs to be answered is what "fact" does place=city >> represent in UK mapping. >> >> Your assertion is that it should be those places granted city status by >> the government. > No, it's never been that. I was saying it was unfortunate that it was done > the way it was, but cest la vie. But once upon a time the definition was much > more precise (but often ignored, indeed I did it myself with Ely), and is now > a rather wooly subjective definition. > > ___ > Talk-GB mailing list > Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb [1] Links: -- [1] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City
On 25/02/14 13:07, Philip Barnes wrote: > That is absolutely my point, we should tag the facts and leave it to > different renderers to then use those facts in the way that best suits > their users. The question that needs to be answered is what "fact" does place=city represent in UK mapping. Your assertion is that it should be those places granted city status by the government. Other people are suggesting alternatives. There is a long history of tags in OSM not meaning quite what a natural british english interpretation would suggest, because meaning ideally needs to be similar across the globe so we need to find a local way in each area to define what a tag means so that meaning does not deviate too much across the globe. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City
On 25/02/14 13:07, Philip Barnes wrote: That is absolutely my point, we should tag the facts and leave it to different renderers to then use those facts in the way that best suits their users. The question that needs to be answered is what "fact" does place=city represent in UK mapping. Your assertion is that it should be those places granted city status by the government. Other people are suggesting alternatives. There is a long history of tags in OSM not meaning quite what a natural british english interpretation would suggest, because meaning ideally needs to be similar across the globe so we need to find a local way in each area to define what a tag means so that meaning does not deviate too much across the globe. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City
That is absolutely my point, we should tag the facts and leave it to different renderers to then use those facts in the way that best suits their users. We should not deliberately mis-tag to make Milton Keynes bigger than St Albans on mapnick, mapnick is just one of many renderers, a fact often forgotten. Using a combination of status, population and area, the renderer can make its own decisions. >From a tourism point of view, the small cities offer far more than many of the >large ones. Phil (trigpoint) -- Sent from my Nokia N9 On 25/02/2014 12:12 David Earl wrote: place=city, contrary to various differing cultural uses of the word City, used to be somewhere over a certain population, 100K IIRC. However, it appears the definition on the wiki has been substantially relaxed, as has town. Nevertheless it is still defined by size, albeit woolly: "The largest urban settlements in the territory" and in OSM has nothing to do with ceremonial or institutional status. I think it is a shame that this happened, but it is hard to change now. I think it would be better to state the facts, and then leave it up to the consumer (renderer, router, whatever) to decide on how it interprets those facts. Naively, a renderer would use population to decide on label sizes. But that has a problem in how the data is sourced (the US often has population on "city" limit signs, but we don't here). But population isn't the only criterion. Some places punch above their weight, because they are regional markets or transport hubs or whatever. The ceremonial status (Ely) sometimes reflects this, but is sometimes just a historical anomaly (St Davids). But somnetimes it can be quite extreme: for example Hay-on-Wye, population about 2,000, isn't even really a town in OSM parlance, but is a very important settlement locally in an area where west of Hereford there isn't much of any size, and would probably be shown on most maps just one grade down from Hereford. Similarly, Bedford is probably not populationally a city, but I think most people would subjectively class it alongside Cambridge, which isn't much bigger. I think there's also a problem at the top end. Cambridge (120,000) is at the very low end from a population POV, and is completely qualitatively and quantitatively different from places like Birmingham and Manchester. I think we are missing something to distinguish these massive conurbations. And Manchester and even London pale before places like Mexico City. There seem to me to be Cambridge and Bedford-like places - essentially large and important "towns", Sheffield and Leeds-like places (small "cities"), Birmingham and Manchester-like places (large metropolitan areas), London and New York-like like places (very large cities) and the real giants like Mexico City and Tokyo (megacities) More generally, I think we still need a way to reflect cultural references and concepts while linking to global commonalities. David ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City
place=city, contrary to various differing cultural uses of the word City, used to be somewhere over a certain population, 100K IIRC. However, it appears the definition on the wiki has been substantially relaxed, as has town. Nevertheless it is still defined by size, albeit woolly: "The largest urban settlements in the territory" and in OSM has nothing to do with ceremonial or institutional status. I think it is a shame that this happened, but it is hard to change now. I think it would be better to state the facts, and then leave it up to the consumer (renderer, router, whatever) to decide on how it interprets those facts. Naively, a renderer would use population to decide on label sizes. But that has a problem in how the data is sourced (the US often has population on "city" limit signs, but we don't here). But population isn't the only criterion. Some places punch above their weight, because they are regional markets or transport hubs or whatever. The ceremonial status (Ely) sometimes reflects this, but is sometimes just a historical anomaly (St Davids). But somnetimes it can be quite extreme: for example Hay-on-Wye, population about 2,000, isn't even really a town in OSM parlance, but is a very important settlement locally in an area where west of Hereford there isn't much of any size, and would probably be shown on most maps just one grade down from Hereford. Similarly, Bedford is probably not populationally a city, but I think most people would subjectively class it alongside Cambridge, which isn't much bigger. I think there's also a problem at the top end. Cambridge (120,000) is at the very low end from a population POV, and is completely qualitatively and quantitatively different from places like Birmingham and Manchester. I think we are missing something to distinguish these massive conurbations. And Manchester and even London pale before places like Mexico City. There seem to me to be Cambridge and Bedford-like places - essentially large and important "towns", Sheffield and Leeds-like places (small "cities"), Birmingham and Manchester-like places (large metropolitan areas), London and New York-like like places (very large cities) and the real giants like Mexico City and Tokyo (megacities) More generally, I think we still need a way to reflect cultural references and concepts while linking to global commonalities. David ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City
I added a population tag to some of the dubious ones (primarily the larger non-cities) to enable them to be identified by the renderer. Rochester/Chatham is complicated (not least by the fact that Rochester managed to lose its City status by accident). On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Andy Street wrote: > On Tue, 25 Feb 2014 10:13:59 + > Andy Allan wrote: > > > If anything, I'd like to amend the UK use of place=city to come up > > with a use of the tag that fits in with global OSM usage. We can add a > > tag for 'ceremonial status' or similar to indicate they are a 'city' > > according to the weird UK rules but aren't actually cities in the main > > meaning of the word. So long as it's all agreed and documented, I'd be > > in favour of a change. > > +1 > > I see similarities between this and admin areas where I've tagged > admin_level=* to denote place within a global hierarchy then > supplemented it with designation=unitary_authority etc. to record > regional intricacies. > > Perhaps we could use designation=GB:city in this instance? > > -- > Regards, > > Andy Street > > ___ > Talk-GB mailing list > Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb > ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City
On Tue, 25 Feb 2014 10:13:59 + Andy Allan wrote: > If anything, I'd like to amend the UK use of place=city to come up > with a use of the tag that fits in with global OSM usage. We can add a > tag for 'ceremonial status' or similar to indicate they are a 'city' > according to the weird UK rules but aren't actually cities in the main > meaning of the word. So long as it's all agreed and documented, I'd be > in favour of a change. +1 I see similarities between this and admin areas where I've tagged admin_level=* to denote place within a global hierarchy then supplemented it with designation=unitary_authority etc. to record regional intricacies. Perhaps we could use designation=GB:city in this instance? -- Regards, Andy Street ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City
It is obviously documented on wikipedia, but also one of those basic bits of general knowledge you pick up over the years, was probably taught it at school. It is always in the news at the time of jubilees that new cities are created. Phil (trigpoint) -- Sent from my Nokia N9 On 25/02/2014 10:13 Andy Allan wrote: On 25 February 2014 09:47, Philip Barnes wrote: > City status is an honour granted by The Queen, not something that can be > claimed by size or population. Like trunk roads, its quirky and like trunk > roads I see it as the way we do things here. Is that actually documented anywhere though? I'm playing devils advocate here, since I've been annoyed in the past to see Croydon tagged as a city when in my mind it's just a suburb of London. But remember that it's up to us to choose what place=city means in the context of OSM. For example, we've rounded on our American colleages for tagging all of their thousands of village-sized "Incorporated cities" as place=city, and now they've changed them to villages and kept place=city for, well, 'actual cities'. But then we go around saying that towns like Ely and St Asaph are place=city, which smacks of dual standards at best and probably even unhelpful tagging. Do consumers of OSM data find it helpful that St Asaph is in the list of place=city objects? If anything, I'd like to amend the UK use of place=city to come up with a use of the tag that fits in with global OSM usage. We can add a tag for 'ceremonial status' or similar to indicate they are a 'city' according to the weird UK rules but aren't actually cities in the main meaning of the word. So long as it's all agreed and documented, I'd be in favour of a change. Cheers, Andy ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City
On 25 February 2014 09:47, Philip Barnes wrote: > City status is an honour granted by The Queen, not something that can be > claimed by size or population. Like trunk roads, its quirky and like trunk > roads I see it as the way we do things here. Is that actually documented anywhere though? I'm playing devils advocate here, since I've been annoyed in the past to see Croydon tagged as a city when in my mind it's just a suburb of London. But remember that it's up to us to choose what place=city means in the context of OSM. For example, we've rounded on our American colleages for tagging all of their thousands of village-sized "Incorporated cities" as place=city, and now they've changed them to villages and kept place=city for, well, 'actual cities'. But then we go around saying that towns like Ely and St Asaph are place=city, which smacks of dual standards at best and probably even unhelpful tagging. Do consumers of OSM data find it helpful that St Asaph is in the list of place=city objects? If anything, I'd like to amend the UK use of place=city to come up with a use of the tag that fits in with global OSM usage. We can add a tag for 'ceremonial status' or similar to indicate they are a 'city' according to the weird UK rules but aren't actually cities in the main meaning of the word. So long as it's all agreed and documented, I'd be in favour of a change. Cheers, Andy ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Town v City
On 25/02/14 09:47, Philip Barnes wrote: City status is an honour granted by The Queen, not something that can be claimed by size or population. Like trunk roads, its quirky and like trunk roads I see it as the way we do things here. You are correct that a City in the UK is defined that way. That does not necessarily mean that place=city in OSM is defined in that way, any more than every two man village in the US that decides to call itself a city is tagged place=city in OSM. The actual definition for place=city given in the wiki is: "Use the place=city tag to identify the largest settlement or settlements within a territory, including national, state and provincial capitals, and other major conurbations. To be honest I'm not sure what we have traditionally done in terms of mapping place=city in the UK but as a general point you should beware of attempting to interpret tags literally against local legalites. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
