Cognised existence: Populated areas are settlement entities (city, town, village, hamlet, urban area) represented as points or polygons.
Question: Where are villages, towns, and cities, and what is their settlement hierarchy?
OSM wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place
Realisations
Instead of hardcoding implementation schemas here, SPHERE separates semantic meaning from dataset implementation. See the following realisations for how to access this data:
- [[Realisations/OpenStreetMap_populated_areas|OpenStreetMap — settlement entities via
place=*]] - [[Realisations/Natural_Earth_populated_areas|Natural Earth —
ne_10m_populated_places,ne_10m_urban_areas]]
Geometry Representations
| Rep ID | Source Dataset | Geometry Type | Native CRS | Suitable For | Not Suitable For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
settlements_osm_points | OSM via Geofabrik | Point | EPSG:4326 | Settlement hierarchy mapping, nearest settlement analysis | Official census totals or demographic structure |
settlements_ne_10m_points | Natural Earth populated places | Point | EPSG:4326 | Global city hierarchy maps, small-scale settlement context | Local-level settlement completeness |
settlements_ne_10m_urban_areas | Natural Earth urban areas | Polygon | EPSG:4326 | Broad urban footprint context at global scale | Legal urban boundaries or municipal planning precision |
Limitations
- OSM and Natural Earth settlement layers are not official census registers.
- Settlement class definitions vary by country and mapping conventions.
- Use statistical population grids or census datasets for demography and density metrics.