hi,

just wrote a program that extracts (simplified / resized) poly files of boundaries (for osmosis) from an osm file. it can also produce hirarchies of boundaries (is_in). So output would be i.e. "Hofheim" is in "Hessen", "Germany", "Europe"... outputs are

- *.poly,
- *.htm
- *.csv
- *.png

osm.wiki/Boundaries.pl

the *.poly files can be used with osmosis to extract regions from planet.osm (or smaller portions of osm data).

ciao

gerhard