[OSM-dev] Defining the area of a country / What country is a LatLon in.

[Marcus Wolschon]

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Dear everyone,

I was looking into finding out if a given point is inside
a given country (or "what country is this node in").
(To interpret addresses and country-specific speed-limits.)

Is there a definitive way to do this yet?
What I can see is that the borders are multiple ways of
boundary=administrative and "right|country"=XXX and
"right|country"=YYY .

How am I to
a) get all border-pieces without downloading all of the planet.
b) interpret them (they may be incomplete e.g. in the baltic see).

We have a defined tag "place=country;name=XXX" and it makes no
sense to have multiple ways of tagging the same thing.
Should I
1) join the existing way-parts into areas with place=country (very long
way with many points)

2) join the border-segments in a new relation containing an ordered list
   of ways (relations are unordered), document this and remove
   place=country from the wiki as obsolete

3) ...

Marcus
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