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How to categorize Island names

I need help with a scheme to categorize islands, the problem is that Stockholm Archipelago looks very crowded, I don't think natural=island was ment to handle the 200k islands of Sweden. These islands are of course of different importance, and we could probably use the same scheme as the place=* since these islands actually work like small cities and suburbs..

Some of the islands are more important than the near by suburbs, but most are unimportant?

PS. This is marked as Community wiki since it's very hard to give an answer to this question.

PPS Should I just use important=not_very? :-)

Stockholm Archipelago

From http://osm.org/go/0bIe8O

islands name tagging

This question is marked "community wiki".

asked 12 Feb '11, 00:56

emj
2.0k●12●35●47
accept rate: 15%

edited 12 Feb '11, 00:57

One Answer:

As the islands are mapped as areas, the renderer could use the size/surface area of each island to control the rendering. So only the names of the larger islands appear at low zooms. Though I don't know if any renderers currently do this, or if it is actually possible with Mapnik etc. It may require some pre-processing, to calculate the size of each island.

Or you could tag the islands with their population (if that data is available), then render based on that.

answered 12 Feb '11, 02:13

Vclaw
9.2k●8●95●141
accept rate: 22%

Bad idea, the size of an island is very unrelated to it's "importantness". I think the most well known island name in there is Grinda and it's pretty small.

(12 Feb '11, 18:54) emj

Why is that island 'important'? Important to whom?

(12 Feb '11, 22:53) Vclaw

Why is a city or suburb more important than the name of a place nearby? Sure place=* categories are hard to use to judge importantness, but they are one way to do it.

(16 Feb '11, 19:44) emj