Poor selection of labels on low zoom levels

[Rovastar]

One of the things that I have noticed for some time is the rendering on extreme zoomed out levels level 2-5. I know we really look at these levels but if you do it just looks crazy madness.

I'll take Europe as an example

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=3/47.16/32.87

Now that level 3 I would expect to see names for this level for countries, large ones on the map but instead tiny places/countries are.

What happens:
UK is not displayed but Isle of Man and Jersey are.
France is not displayed but Andorra and Monaco are.
Netherlands, Italy and Spain are not displayed but the capitals of these countries are.and Malta, Gibraltar displayed.
This to name but a few.

Frankly it just looks stupid and makes the map look amateurish.

Any ideas how to make this better?
I am thinking that we could look at way area size and do something with this. Looking for large countries and displaying those first but I am not sure if I could get this to work as......

And at level 4 we have different but equally confusing issues.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=4/50.46/11.69

Are are a few highlights
UK displays abbreviation for countries, I know that CYM is Wales but it is just confusing...
Spain is not displayed again but regions like EX are as is the capital.
Turkey's name is displayed but so are regions 1-50 (to whatever).
Most of eastern Europe; Poland, lativa, etc are not displayed but the region abbreviations are.
Belgium has 3 names displayed?!
and many more.

My thoughts for this are it is likely to do with the tagging of admin boundary (wrong levels,etc) and the data. But we could have clearer display for countries versus the admin boundaries/regions. Maybe a different clearer/different colour line size for the country versus states and the text could be different colour/style too. Again I am thinking way area could be helpful here.

I understand to countries like the USA need to have regions/states displayed for a vast country and it would make no sense not rendering them. I am do understand this no easy solution and there will be edge cases no matter that we think logically should be displayed but are not but I think must be able to improve on current situation.

and level 5

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=5/50.121/9.580

has less but still confusing problems, I struggle to know where places are. Too many regions (IMHO) not enough capitals cities (only a few displayed)

Are we just rendering and/or editing boundaries 'wrong'?

Let me know your thoughts people......

[Rovastar]

And just as a reference point Google Maps looks like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d8257862!2d9.7525171!3d50.7226283

And that is more like what I would expect to see.

[matkoniecz]

I suggest to change title to something like "Poor choice of labels on low zoom levels", otherwise we will soon have comments about bad rendering style for motorways and unrendered forests.

[vincentdephily]

The osm-fr layer (a fork of the osm-carto one) and pretty much all other layers on osm.org do a better job at low zooms. This isn't a data issue.

[Rovastar]

I should have looked at Christain's stuff first....

That looks much better (and better use of islands too using wayarea) I'll look at updating the placenames.mss to get as better representation.

[dieterdreist]

2014/1/16 vincentdephily [email protected]

The osm-frhttp://layers.openstreetmap.fr/?zoom=3&lat=29.296&lon=5.56979&layers=B0000FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFlayer (a fork of the osm-carto one) and pretty much all other layers on
osm.org do a better job at low zooms. This isn't a data issue.

yes, the main countries are mostly there, still some are missing
(Allemagne, Belgique and Portugal)

[dkniffin]

I believe this is one symptom of a larger issue. @pnorman, @simonpoole, and I were just discussing something similar in IRC, but in the context of cities. The problem is that it's hard to determine which cities (or countries in this case) are "more important" than others. My initial thought was admin_level would be a good indication, but @pnorman gave a good example: "Albany is the capital of NY state, but you probably want to render New York City instead".

[dieterdreist]

2014/1/17 oddityoverseer13 [email protected]

The problem is that it's hard to determine which cities (or countries in
this case) are "more important" than others

for countries importance is quite well represented by the population, while
for cities I agree that it is more complicated, anyway, we are
circumventing this problem for cities as we don't use our own data but a
shapefile from natural earth ;-)

[Rovastar]

I think there are 2 issues here.

1. the current rendering. It really isn't good enough but OSM FR carto has improved on this a lot. So something based on this can be used. And really that is what this initial issue is about.
2. Render prominent cities rather/as well as capital cities.
   The best way I think of doing this using the population tag in the city/town/village node. I think OSM FR carto uses this (to a limited degree).

Then you can even have larger text, etc for mega cities, large cities, small cities, etc. Obviously this tag need to be set and changing the carto system queries to take a new tag would be needed (which is a pain).

However this is not perfect either. As some places people refer to the greater area for common usage around them rather than the actual area. e.g. Manchester/Greater Mancester, London/Greater London in the UK and probably better example then those around the world.

However it will improve the map more.

[simonpoole]

@Rovastar as had already pointed out, population is a very bad metric for importance, particularly for cities.

[pnorman]

we don't use our own data but a shapefile from natural earth

Only on low zooms. z6+ cities are all OSM data

[dieterdreist]

2014/1/18 Paul Norman [email protected]

Only on low zooms. z6+ cities are all OSM data

yes, sure, sorry for being imprecise, but the OP was speaking of zoom3 and
4.

[matkoniecz]

Too many unimportant borders of lower administrative entities and absurdly early displaying labels for them are main problems (at least in Europe).

[matkoniecz]

There are still problems, but issues mentioned here are now fixed.

Except

Belgium has 3 names displayed?!

but it is a tagging problem, it is a single label - see http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/52411#map=8/50.536/4.398.