* Nathan Edgars II <nerou...@gmail.com> [2010-10-25 21:39 -0400]: > I've done it in Florida. Here's the algorithm I used: > principal city of a Metropolitan Statistical Area: city > principal city of a Micropolitan Statistical Area: town > other incorporated municipality with population over 10,000: suburb > (these are all inside statistical areas) > other incorporated municipality with population under 10,000: village, > hamlet, or (in the case of Islandia) locality (according to the > cutoffs on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place) > other unincorporated places: left alone for now
I mostly like this, but I feel somewhat constrained by the place= values for some of this. I went over the classifications that this would make in Maryland and agreed with most of it, except that I'd really like another value above place=city. This algorithm would mark Arlington, VA; Alexandria, VA; Reston, VA; Bethesda, MD; Rockville, MD; Frederick MD; and Gaithersburg, MD as cities, in addition to Washington, DC. That's pretty fair, considering those places' populations and economic importance, but DC should be ranked a step higher than the rest. Likewise, it would make Baltimore and Towson both cities and, while making Towson a city is not unfair, Baltimore is far more important a place than Towson is. (For one thing, people from other states are much more likely to have heard of Baltimore.) I've been thinking a lot about city importance since I read http://www.41latitude.com/post/1178194590/jaywalking and http://www.41latitude.com/post/400972984/most-important-cities-united-states . I think I'm mostly of the mind that OSM's basically four-tier system (city, town, village, hamlet) system isn't granular enough for properly indicating cities' importance relative to each other. I think some of the general "importance" tagging ideas that have been floated might help with this. If I have time, I might see about getting them on the proposal track actively, rather than languishing. -- ...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/ PGP: 026A27F2 print: D200 5BDB FC4B B24A 9248 9F7A 4322 2D22 026A 27F2 --- -- I parry the demon's two-handed sword with my stiletto. -- Famous Last Words, #731 ---- --- -- _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
