Tagging Places
harry-wood edited this page Apr 4, 2012
·
3 revisions
Here is a quick-intro to what you need to know about tagging places, condensed from various pages on the OSM wiki and postings to the mailing list. For further information consult taginfo.
Top-level places:
- place=city: Typically has a population of over 100,000. If you are mapping a city, please take a minute to check if its population tag is present and accurate. We use population as part of the label priority logic in the stylesheet.
- place=town: Rough population range of 10,000 to 100,000, or smaller/less important than the cities in the area.
- place=village: Rough population range of 1,000 to 10,000, or smaller/less important than the towns in the area.
- place=hamlet: Rough population of (well) under 1,000. Usually rural.
Places-within-places:
- place=suburb: For neighborhoods in cities, or large neighborhoods/sectors within towns. Note that this tag has little to do with the common North American concept of suburbia and is perfectly acceptable within a city center.
- place=neighbourhood: For small neighborhoods within cities (including neighborhoods within neighborhoods), or neighborhoods within towns. Note the non-American spelling.
- place=hamlet: This should generally not be used as a place within a larger city or town, but it still happens a lot. It's likely that something tagged place=hamlet within a city or a town should be tagged as a suburb or neighborhood instead. Thanks to imports, some apartment buildings or housing complexes are also tagged as hamlets. They should be converted to landuse=residential unless they are rather large, in which case leaving them as a hamlet is fine.
- landuse=residential: For areas of residential land. combined with a name tag if applicable. This is one of many landuse tags in OSM, conventionally used on areas not individual nodes.
- building=residential or building=house: For an individual residential building, apartment building, or house. As an area this will show up quite prominently as a building in OSM 'standard' renderings. You can just use building=yes for other non-residential types of buildings, or where you're not sure. These tags can be used on just a node and can be combined with a name tag e.g. for a named apartment block.