[OSM-talk] How to extract national borders?

[John Smith]

On 28 May 2010 08:35, Rory McCann <rory at technomancy.org> wrote:
> I tried using XAPI to look for "../*[admin_level=2]", or
> ".../*[admin_level=2][boundary=administrative]" or
> "relation[admin_level=2]", but all took so long that I stopped them and
> were producing OSM files that were hunderds of MB big. So I wonder if
> I'm doing something wrong, or if there is a better way.

As far as I'm aware the XAPI interface is only capable of searching
for one key pair and a bounding box, also while it might be safe to
assume all borders are likely to be relations, there might be some
small island nations that don't need a relation.