[OSM-dev] [OSM-talk] Osmosis and large bounding polygons

[Martijn van Oosterhout]

On Jan 9, 2008 10:58 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Sounds good, especially as I have the simplification code lying
> around, in Java, somewhere; only thing that bugs me a bit is that
> this would do the simplification every time you use the polygon which
> strikes me as unneccessary. Haven't tried the 5 MB polygon people are
> talking about, but I guess it will take some time for this to be
> simplified.

My question is: why is the polygon so complex? Yes, the
northern/southern borders of the US might be a bit complex for some
parts, but the east/west coast would be a few dozen segments at most.
Australia I think you can do in maybe 50.

The problem with automatically simplifying is that you don't know
what's important. For example, when cutting out NL for the AND import
it needed to be *exact*. But to have it done in a reasonable time
someone simplfied the border in areas where there was *no data*. Also
the entire coastline was replaced by 10 segments. That cut it down
enourmously but is not something that can be automated.

So maybe it could be an option but it would be better if people worked
out whether the polygons really needed to be complex in the first
place...

Have a nice day,
-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog at gmail.com> http://svana.org/kleptog/