[OSM-talk] national borders and josm plugin to selectively load gpx osm files for current view

[David Earl]

On 18/09/2007 14:37, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> Christof Dallermassl wrote:
> 
>> Another problem is that a border usually is a border for two countries, 
>> so the segments must be reused (is this the correct way to do this). How 
>> will we do this in near future with relations and without segments?
> 
> The way it's been done for other boundaries (e.g. counties in England)
> is to have keys like
>   left:state=Western Australia  right:state=South Australia
> Any reason why that shouldn't work for countries?

The sharing segments issue will be irrelevant when segments are 
abolished next month. Equally boundaries expressed as left: and right: 
won't work any more because you can't do this for a complete boundary 
polygon which shares its boundary with more than one other region (most do).

They'll need to become relationships presumably. I think this is a good 
thing, as the boundary can be a set of manageably sized ways instead of 
either huge polygons, or disconnected portions. So a region might be a 
relationship of a set of ways forming the boundary plus a node which is 
a hint as to where to put the caption. Some of the ways included can 
also be included in the neighbouring region. Indeed, some of them can be 
in included regions (a district council boundaries often shares part of 
the same boundary as the county of which it is a part; likewise counties 
and state biundaries in the US, and I'm sure elsewhere too).

David