Hi, those of us who use relations to tag administrative boundaries usually apply the schema described in
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:boundary which suggests to use a type=boundary relation with "enclaves" and "exclaves". At the time of conception, that was ok because administrative areas (e.g. countries) often required border lines taht consisted of many ways and exclaves, something that plain multipolygons did not support. Since we now have "advanced multipolygons" as described here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Relation:multipolygon#Advanced_multipolygons (which, being true to their name, support any number of disjunct areas which may have zero or more holes each, and even islands in holes and so on), there is an equivalence between the two: each administrative area corresponds to exactly one multipolygon. I am thus suggesting that we drop using the special "type=boundary" relation and instead use a simple "type=multipolygon" for administrative areas. Everything else would stay the same (boundary=administrative, admin_level=x, name=y, ...). Members would not carry the roles "exclave" and "enclave" (which seem to have been difficult to understand for some), but instead simply "outer" and "inner" just like with plain multipolygons. I have described the suggested change in detail here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Relation:boundary#Use_type.3Dmultipolygon_instead The main advantage of this is that any piece of software that works with our data would just have to understand multipolygons - wheter they are additionally tagged as representing a boundary, a forest, a lake or whatever - instead of having to carry a list of relation types that form one or the other kind of area. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk