[OSM-dev] Extracting national boundaries

[Gary68]

please have a look at boundaries.pl in the wiki.

hope this helps.


On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 11:05 +0200, Colin Smale wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am trying to extract national boundaries from OSM and it's proving 
> more difficult than I anticipated.
> 
> What I would like to end up with, is a collection of complex polygons 
> (inner and outer rings including enclaves/exclaves), one for each 
> country. I thought I should be able to do that by getting all relations 
> with type=boundary, admin_level=2. Using XAPI I got a large file which 
> contains some of the information, but as some national boundaries seem 
> to be implemented using subrelations and subsubrelations etc I now find 
> I will have to query the database for each subrelation individually and 
> drill down successively until I have all the ways I need. But that looks 
> as if it will give me large numbers of internal borders between 
> lower-level admin units as well, and it will be an enormous job to 
> stitch everything together and discard the internal borders.
> 
> For many countries there is a simple relation for the national boundary, 
> referencing a number of ways, which I can concatenate to produce the 
> complete outer boundary. But France and Slovakia for example don't seem 
> to have a single relation as a starting point.
> 
> I can't imagine I am the first person to want to do this. Has anyone got 
> any tips? Or maybe even a ready-made data set?
> 
> National boundaries don't change all that often, but it does happen from 
> time to time, so it would be nice if this could be repeatable in the future.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help you can give!
> 
> Regards,
> Colin
> 
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