[OSM-talk] is_in and similar tags

OJ W ojwlists at googlemail.com
Tue Jul 28 18:31:38 BST 2009


Could someone[1] setup a web-service where you send it a lat/lon and
it returns a list of all boundaries that point is within?  So just one
website imports the boundary data instead of everyone having to know
how to do the 'is within' search[2].

Namefinder could then query this to add its own internal is_in tags to
the place= nodes as it's importing them.  It might also be quite neat
for "describe my location" type things.

[1] @lazyosm

[2] I assume this is complex, since boundaries aren't guaranteed to
contain a single ordered list of nodes?



On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 2:48 PM, David Earl<david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:
> Shaun McDonald wrote:
>>
>> On 28 Jul 2009, at 13:43, John Smith wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Is there a real need for is_in tags or have admin boundaries replaced
>>> the need?
>>>
>>
>> Admin boundaries are the new way of doing this. The is_in tag was the
>> early way of trying to show a hierarchy of admin areas.
>
> It is still *very* helpful to have is_in present though. It is much
> easier to present this information in a search than to do polygon tests
> which requires a whole new algorithm (desirable though that is), and of
> course, boundaries are nowhere near complete, and you often know in
> which region a place is without knowing the exact boundary.




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