aeroway= tags rendering issues

Hi,

I was tweaking an airport (Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport) and came across a few starnge rendering issues in Mapnik.

  1. The aeroway=gate places do not seem to render these days. I haven’t seen it personally, but at the wiki page there’s an example picture of Schiphol Airport with the gatenumbers, so should have been working before… Is it a bug or removed feature or what?

  2. aeroway=taxiway is recommended to use with the ref=* tag, but that does not get rendered… Other airports (like Chicago O’hare International Airport) place name=* tags instead of ref=* to get it plotted. What is the situation with this one, what should be recommended behavior that is logical and gets shown?

  3. The little airplane sign for aeroway=aerodome is rendered only for zoom levels lower than 10, which I feel is not enough. I think it covers such a huge area that it is not practically used for searching for things on the map. It would be more useful if it rendered down at least to 12 or 13, and shouldn’t obscure any features as on that level things are still quite packed.

  4. The aeroway=terminal wiki page has two recommendations: drawing a way and tagging it, or drawing a way, placing a point in the middle and tagging that. As I’ve seen, if the name=* tag is used, the first method (way) gets rendered with the name, but the second method (point) does not show the name. Is this the expected behavior?

Hope to come to terms with these, I really want to make better maps.
Thanks!

  1. Will be implemented very soon. I have the patch ready, and it will probably be committed tonight, after which it will usually show up on the map in a few days. The example you see on the wiki page is from the Kosmos renderer, not from mapnik.

  2. I don’t see a mention of ref=* on the aeroway=taxiway wiki entry, but do agree that the idea is good. Perhaps the wiki can be clearer on this, and you could open a mapnik ticket for this. Are there actual cases where the ref and name of a taxiway differ?

  3. http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/1835 also mentions the airport symbol. It would be good if you could also comment on the ticket with your thoughts.

  4. There is no special handling for aeroway=terminal name rendering, and it currently gets rendered from a “catch-all” rule for areas. That indeed means terminals as node don’t render. I don’t know why the wiki would recommend a node inside a closed way when just the latter will suffice. Maybe that’s a bit of advice from the old days of tagging.

I checked it out and Osmarender does show the gates, and Mapnik not, as you said. Probably the colours tricked me with Kosmos renderer, I thought it was Mapnik.

On the side it says - Useful combinations: Key:ref, and no Key:name… Not sure where the recommendation comes from. Probably Key:ref makes more sense, I’ll open a ticket for this. Don’t know too many airports, but I’d say “in real life” there’s only one identifying character sequence for any taxiway, it just depends on OSM, how we categorize those character sequences: name or reference… Opened a ticket for this.

Done, thanks!

I agree with tagging a way only. I can imagine one case for the node inside: airport terminals can have really weird shapes, and placing the name in the geometrical centre might not be the best for some of them. But that’s again a “don’t tag for the renderer” issue, I think it’s better to fix the renderer, than placing name-nodes around the map for such things…

Thanks!
Greg