Proposed features/population

From OpenStreetMap Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search
The Feature Page for the approved proposal Key:population can be located at Key:population.


Key:population
Status: Approved (active)
Proposed by: ?
Tagging: population=[[:Tag:population=<number>|<number>]]
Applies to:
Definition:
Rendered as:
Draft start:
RFC start:
Vote start:
Vote end:

Contents

old content

A nice feature for the map rendering of place names (cities, towns, ...); Place names can be scaled according to population, giving a better hint how big a place is. It also makes rendering at low zoom levels better as small places can be left out.

The place-key can still be used, but it is not strictly necessary to use it - different countries are usually having slightly different definitions for place categories, anyway. The number of inhabitants is a physical property, thus universal.

As the population is only used for name scaling, it does not have to be very precise and can be approximated.

To make rendering easier, each value of the place tag (city, town, village, hamlet, ...) could be assigned a population number, making it possible to just look at the population tag to scale fonts accordingly while keeping backwards compatibility.

Opinion

Maybe I am too late? But I still vote against this. We need to have some distinction for town sizes but population is the wrong measure.

I would support another classification on importance like for example from important to less important

- major administratif centres (I'd call them capitals but that would bring us trouble in some areas where there is political dispute, ie Taiwan) - major cities (having a sphere of influence over the complete country, eg in France those would be Lyon and Marseille) - regional centres (having a regional sphere of influence) - cities (having a local sphere of influence) - towns --Bartv 08:22, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

This is a tough one, for two reasons - areas of cities (like Bartv mentions) - when zoomed in far enough, I would expect "London" to disappear, and all the smaller areas (Mayfair, South Kensington, Fulham) to show instead. You would have to make it clear if Urban dwellers can be double counted, i.e. once for Wimbledon Village, once for Wimbledon (town), once for London (city). Secondly, I would expect little villages to show up at low zoom levels if they are in the middle of nowhere - e.g. it doesn't matter how big Ullapool is; it's in the middle of nowhere, major transport interchange (road/ferry) so it's strategically important when looking at large areas. Gravitystorm 19:22, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

What about distinguishing between towns that are part of an urban area (i.e. close together) and towns are that are far apart (e.g. a small town in the middle of nowhere)? Ideally, the latter should show up on a map, but the former should not to avoid clutter. How should this be done? Should we use "type=urban" or "type=rural"? Should the renderer sort all the towns in a tile or group of tiles in descending order by population, then only render x towns starting from the top of the list, and discard the rest? Andrewpmk 02:09, 24 August 2007 (BST)

Revisiting population

This vote appears to have been dormant for a few weeks. Let's have another look at population.

The previous arguments against the population tag include: inappropriate unit of measure, inclusion/exclusion of merged suburbs, updates, label rendering, duplication, proximity, other factors. It appears that some of these arguments have been addressed since they were originally posted.

population. This is not an argument against population but an argument for other tags to indicate importance for reasons other than population.

Revisitin Opinion


Population requires a date

A number for a population is not as static as height, location, size etc. It may change every minute. Thus I feel that a population would have to be accompanied by a date. Maybe a place could even track changes in population.

I did not see a real propopsal for the syntax. Should it be just like this? 

 k="population" v=number

I feel that you would need as well a date and a precision. A simple syntax could be 

 k="population_date" v=date

... and there may be different choices for the date syntax (which should be a topic of its own) such as

This should rather be census=year for places that uses census to calculate population (such as Brazil, every 5 year) or estimate=year where estimated population is used. To give date of population more accurate than year is meaningless, and to use data where you only have decade or century accuracy is pointless as this indicates that the data is outdated. --Skippern 14:38, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Precision could be given e.g. as 

 k="population_precision" v="1"

... which would be a precise number, Other values could be

Yet another concept would be to create a new data primitive, such as data: 

<data id=12345>
 <tag k="population" v="123">
 <tag k="date"       v="2007-12-31"
 <tag k="precision"  v="1">

<data id=123444>
 <tag k="population" v="100">
 <tag k="date"       v="1990"
 <tag k="precision"  v="10">

A place then would reference various data sources.

Votes

The two votes above are from a previous round of voting that appears indecicive. Please vote again, below.

Revisiting voting

What had been approved ?

Please summarize the approved tag(s). Thanks.


Old discussion

Hi, If this population feature has been adopted; what is going to happen to it now? And also: Since I'm reading this because of the use on my home city, with city rights and approximately 33000 inhabitants yet indicated as a town of 10000: How is this supposed to function in practice? Mysha

Retrieved from "http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/population"
Personal tools
Namespaces
Variants
Actions
site
Toolbox