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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> Oh, don't worry but thanks for the warning.
> 
> a) I am doing these queries only while indexing the database for
>    cities, roads, zip-codes and houses. This only happens when new
>    data is downloaded and only for the downloaded data. Not while
>    actually searching for addresses before doing the routing.

Then why can't you download the planet every now and then and update 
your borders ;-)

No honestly, you're asking for more than OSM can deliver. Go get your 
country boundaries elsewhere (maybe geonames.org)? Firstly, it is not 
yet clear how borders are going to be mapped (some say that relations 
might be used for this). Current border mapping is (as you may have 
found out yourself) not really compatible, planet-wide, and I don't 
think that trying to forge some sort of half-baked rule about how we're 
going to do it will help you, because as soon as you've implemented that 
it is going to change. Currently, too few people are concerned about 
borders to give that a lot of thought.

Secondly, even if it *were* clear how to map borders, it would take a 
good while until even the European (not to speak of African etc.) 
borders were even close to forming polygons you could use - you'd be 
guessing heavily most of the time.

You will achieve much better results by using available data from other 
sources - for at least half a year, if not longer.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'