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<p>So these tools are recursing down into relations which are members of the higher-level relation, and then recursing down again? Is that not configurable</p>
<p>One concrete use case is "return the boundary relations for the constituent parts of a given boundary relation", for example "all the district councils in Kent" or "all the counties in Wales". That won't be reliable if rectangular bounding boxes are used, or centroids as in "where the centroid of the lower level relation is within the polygon of the higher level relation". The OSM boundaries in the UK are of various vintages, and are not all present (especially at the lowest levels, civil parishes and community councils). I am working as hard as I can on getting the data complete and up-to-date but it is an enormous job, with over 12,000 administrative entities. That's why the quick and simple feedback that this parent-child link gives is so important to me. The UK also has a number of anomalies, such as an English authority covering some territorial waters of Wales, a ceremonial county split between two administrative counties, and missing layers such as Berkshire where the county still exists but the council has been abolished. I have written some special-purpose tooling to allow me to track progress and detect (possible) errors. Without the "subarea" link, I fear I could no longer work with the XML from the API or regional downloads without installing a full software stack including PostGIS etc. Did I mention I refer to the history of the objects as well?</p>
<p>//colin</p>
<p>On 2015-11-27 11:05, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:</p>
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<div class="gmail_quote">2015-11-27 10:54 GMT+01:00 Colin Smale <span><<a href="mailto:colin.smale@xs4all.nl">colin.smale@xs4all.nl</a>></span>:<br />
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0 0 0 .8ex; border-left: 1px #ccc solid; padding-left: 1ex;">Can you describe some *real problems* the use of "subarea" causes? Can you provide any *workable* alternative for the parties which DO support its use? I thought that the "O" stood for "Open". Mappers who don't know about it just carry on.</blockquote>
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<br /><br />the real problem (for me and other mappers in the Italian community) are people coming by and adding all regions of Italy as subregions into the country boundaries, continueing adding all municipalities (or better most of them) into the region relations. This results in many common tools selecting all contained municipalities when selecting the country and the geometry it depends on (members). In Italy we don't have the problem of unprecise sub-boundaries which are not integrated in the upper boundaries. It makes editing of these relations much more complicated for everyone if all sub-boundaries/entities which are not needed for the boundary of the country, are included as well.<br /><br /></div>
<div class="gmail_extra">Workable alternatives for which problem do you require? Is it that subareas are not completely spatially contained in the parent area in OSM but are in the real world? Then the solution is to fix these sub-boundaries. If instead the subareas aren't completely contained in the parent area in the real world, then I'd question the subarea-role for these cases (they are not subareas).<br /><br /></div>
<div class="gmail_extra">Cheers,</div>
<div class="gmail_extra">Martin</div>
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