Hi,
I have a web map of Europe with cities (and towns) and would like to rank their visibility based on its importance. I like using the “population” tag but some cities and villages don’t have such data and so it feels a bit inconsistent. I also think some cities may be more important despite having a smaller population.
I’d love to know people’s thoughts on how do you do it or how would you approach it.
Thanks
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It would depend on what factors are felt to contribute to importance.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:historic
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:heritage
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:capital
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:landuse=port
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:Importance
Apparently this was attempted at some point and has not moved forward.
Maybe your "importance" factor depends on what you intend to do with this info.
The idea is to display it in the map. I’ve been digging around and noticed OpenMapTiles uses some complex calculation to get a column known as “rank”
The place key is OSM's hierarchy of importance: city, town, village, hamlet, isolated_dwelling.
An additional source of information might be Wikidata. If the places have a
wikidatakey, you could look up their population if it's not in OSM, whether they are an administrative center, and so on.That’s helpful. I’ve also heard about hits of a wiki page should be used as it highlights the importance of a place.
Yes, there's an API where you could get the page views
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pageview_statistics
Another idea might be to take the number of languages a Wikipedia article has been written for.
I do not know about this "rank", I have never heard it before.
The people are saying it's quite important to know what you think makes a place important: the first ordinance survey Map was made by a Quaker who was distinctly uninterested in military installations and interested in places of worship. It wasn't a very useful map to the military.
Personally, I would go with a slightly sociological definition of looking at a basket of goods and services and layering those:
Can buy food - small town
Can buy clothing and Hardware - slightly less small town
Can buy musical instruments, specialist tools, kinky undies, Jewellery - Large town or city
Can buy politicians: regional capitol
Can buy government: National Capitol
Do you have a reference to that "Quaker" story? I'm intrigued as it doesn't fit with my understanding of the history (which is that the first explicitly "OS" maps and their forerunners were considered successful for their explicitly military purpose)
It's this map, but I'm not sure how the words ordinance survey got attached to it in my mind. I'm going to blame radio 4 or my own faulty memory.
https://crouchrarebooks.com/product/map/first-systematic-map-of-the-island-1/
Ah! Fun map anyway, thanks :)