On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 1:37 PM, Ray Kiddy <[email protected]> wrote: > > Strangely, I am finding that some of the cities in California _are_ in > the system, but as ways and not as relations. This seems odd, but we > will see.
Well the primary reason to use relations in boundaries is to reduce duplication. So if two cities share a border, the same way can be used in both relations. Sometimes people even use roads or streams or other physical ways as part of boundary relations. I personally usually avoid this because I like having boundary relations completely separate from other things so that they are easier to update in the future. So for a city that is not part of a metro area with adjoining cities, it is perfectly fine to just used a closed way instead of a relation for the boundary. At the end of the day, both ways and relations generally get turned into either linestrings (if linear) or multipolygons (if closed) in things like a postgis database or a shapefile. Toby _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
