this second mail is to think about other ways to determine the importance of a station without any specific tag.
I have to say that I have no idea about how difficult it is to render a map and define render rules. So throw eggs if these ideas are not really thought through...

One way to define the importance of a station could be to have a look a the route relations.
How many different route relations are conected with the stop_positions of the station? Do these relations have a range of service tags (from commuter to long_distance?)
Perhaps we could define a system to evaluate this.

A different way could be the number of platforms: more platforms means higher importance.
Either with the platforms-Tag (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:platforms). But it is not in really wide use. I don't use it, either.
But there could be a way to determine the number of platforms through the stop_area relation.

Of course, you can show me a lot of examples where a station with few route relations / platforms has higher importance than another station with more of these.
But as far as I understand the question, the problem is a render problem in cases of  collision. This happens with a small number of stations per case. So, we don't need absolute importance of stations here, but a relative ranking of these few stations.
And I suppose, in most of these cases, a non-perfect method like the 2 I proposed, could work.

What do you think?
Greetings, Daniel




Am 29.03.2015 um 22:11 schrieb Alexander Matheisen:
Hello everybody,

for rendering, it would be nice to have any information about the
importance of a station/halt. With this information, the renderer could
render captions in different zoom levels or font sizes or decide which
label is rendered in cases of collision.

Currently we have the tag railway:station_category=1-7 for mapping the
German railway station category [1]. But this is very german-specific,
so we should think about a way to tag the importance of a station using
generic rules that are independent from any country-specific categories.

Should we use the existing tag railway:station_category=* and translate
the German definitions, so that they can be applied internationally?
This would have the advantage that German stations, that are already
tagged with the existing tag, do not require any retagging. But using
just numeric values is not so 

Or should we create a new tag a tag like railway:station_importance=*
with some category values such as local/regional/international/... and
leave the existing railway:station_category=* tag for mapping
country-specific categories?

Any ideas?


Regards
Alex

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_railway_station_categories


_______________________________________________
Openrailwaymap mailing list
Openrailwaymap@openrailwaymap.org
http://lists.openrailwaymap.org/lists/listinfo/openrailwaymap