Osmium now includes OGR support. OGR is a popular Open Source library for converting different GIS storage formats into each other. It supports PostGIS, Shapefiles, Spatialite, and many other formats. I had started working on OGR integration many weeks ago, but didn’t quite finish it. I have now added the last bit: Support for OGR Multipolygons. This opens up a lot of new possibilities for Osmium users.

More and more boundaries of administrative areas find their way into OpenStreetMap. In some countries there is already quite a lot of data for several levels of government. Unfortunately it is hard to edit and hard to use because relations must be used to model areas in OSM and relations are notoriously difficult to handle. Relations and with it the areas they represent are often broken as a result. Its therefore hard to get a complete set of administrative areas for a particular country and level of government.