Thanks for the great analysis Andrew. To clarify that I’ve understood it properly, I think your suggestion boils down to the following. Correct me if I’m wrong…
City: > 20,000 population. Based on ABS ‘gravity pull’ centres. Some back and forth on OSM but gives similar numbers of cities to currently in OSM. Creates 72 cities in total. Town: 1,000 - 20,000 pop. Based on ABS ‘urban centres’ list. Gives 657 towns across Aus in total. Village: ~250 - 1,000 pop. Based on ABS ‘urban localities’ list. Gives 1,080 villages in total. Hamlet: < ~ 250 pop. Not listed by ABS. All the rest in OSM else that’s not coded as a locality or farm etc. The 20,000 / 1,000 / 250 pop cutoffs work fine by me. Following the ABS groups as best we can is simple, and will accord with patterns that map/database users are used to seeing elsewhere, which is an asset imo. I fully support it. Rather than nail the village vs hamlet distinction immediately, we could tackle the issue in 2 steps by first gaining agreement on the city / town / village cut offs, and then nailing the more challenging village / hamlet cut off in phase 2. Much of the discussion has focused on listing services / amenities that might be used to ‘boost’ places up the village / hamlet hierarchy. Once we can separate all the potential villages and hamlets from the other higher levels (towns and cities), I’m curious to see how often services / amenities just follow the breakdown you’ve suggested anyway. It may well be that most services / amenities are in ABS Urban Localities and above and that very few of the remaining hamlets have many services anyway. For isolated places, this would be relatively simple to test using OSM data. For example, how many ‘hamlets’ vs villages have hospitals etc and how many outlier hamlets are there (which might be boosted up a level). Thanks again for all your work, Ian _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
