Proposal:Extended place tags

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Extended place tags
Proposal status: Abandoned (inactive)
Proposed by: *
Tagging: place=small_area, area,large_area, region
Statistics:

Rendered as: used for centreing maps


Extended place tag

  • place=small_area|area|large_area, for distinctive named places that don't have a central town or city, e.g. "Snowdonia", "Oxshott Common", "Pendine Sands", "Hyde park"
  • place=region, for centering large area maps, e.g. "midlands", "solent", "great lakes"

Immediate use for these tags would be adding new maps to the OSM@home website, allowing maps to be created for regions of interest that don't correspond with a city.

Areas and regions can also be linked with wikipedia articles, using the wikipedia tag, e.g. [1]

Comments

Think small_area|area|large_area|region is either far too vague or, if you define values for those, too arbritrary; as for this to be useful you need to know not just the centrepoint of a region, but also which zoom level to display. In order for that to work, these place tags need to be associated with a bounding box of some sort. If we don't want to create notes and segments delimiting the rough bounds of an area, then we could do this just by having a 'radius' tag on the place. place=area, radius=2km would mean a 2km circle around the point. Morwen 10:45, 11 June 2007 (BST)

I have a similar idea: (taken from my text in the talk page of the place tag)

I feel the place tag is a bit too narrow in its definition. Villages and towns are not the only places one would like to tag. What about other features that doesn't already have a well defined border, like a bay, a mountain range, or a part of a city where suburb isn't really the correct term for example.

My suggestion is:

  • "place" tag have values like "urban" for cities and villages, "geographic" for mountain ranges, and "water" for features at sea or in a lake (those labels would prpbably be rendered different than land features, like in a blue color). Feel free to find other or better values.
  • to differentiate between places of different size and/or importance a "place_level" key is introduced. This is used to tell the renderers how "important" a feature is. Names of continents should render in zoom levels where villages should not be rendered etc. Values could range from 1-10 or probably more. A recommendation for what levels to use should be defined but not too narrow, there should be room for in-betweens/local differences. (See boundary) The area of the place could also be used to decide how "big" a label should be (a very small island should only have a label rendered at the highest zoom levels, but larger ones could be shown on a map over europe), but that is not always useful.
  • A place could be an area!! A mountain range is not something that have a distinct border, but it's definitly not a point. One should be able to make an approximate outline of the feature that is to be named. The renderer should then be able to write a name label on several tiles if the feature covers several tiles at some zoom level.
  • place_name should go away. There is already a name tag.

Maybe capital=yes could be a property of a country's capital city.

That's probably not all, but at least a start --Bengibollen 17:30, 25 February 2008 (UTC)