[OSM-talk] zones for motorway/in town/outof town?

MP singularita at gmail.com
Thu May 21 00:24:43 BST 2009


> ...but you would need some kind of gis database/functions to evaluate the
>  polygon data.
>  the easy way of reading just keys and values like with most of the other
>  features in the osm database would not be possible.

for more advanced use of OSM data you need function "in which polygons
does this point/way belong" anyway (you need it to find out in which
country/city/suburb/place you are) so I don't consider it such a big
problem. But probably OSM could use a special handling for these
polygons, as currently OSM API will return polygon only if one of its
nodes is inside the requested area. It won't return polygons if entire
request area is inside it. (It won't return even way that lies
partially inside, but all of its nodes are outside - like line
crossing the edge of request area)

This is problem even with current data - if you request part of map
inside city centre of large city, you won't get the city borders. Same
applies for any large landuse/natural areas, like big lakes, forests,
etc ... or administrative boundaries

Martin




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