On Fri, 4 Sep 2015 14:11:26 -0500 Toby Murray <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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 > So, there is nothing that a relation brings to the table that a way does not? I mean, it is clear that for the purposes of drawing, they are the same. But then are they really just the same? I am tempted to try to add relations for these that refer to the ways, moving the associated data appropriately, but then I like to do things like re-normalizing databases and it is sometimes not such a good idea.... So, I will believe you if you say that ways are just aliases for relations. Is this the case? - ray _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
