Tuesday, August 14, 2018

OpenStreetMap can put addresses on nodes, ways, or relations

I've been fiddling with OpenStreetMap (specifically Overpass Turbo) to get the locations of the addresses/buildings in a region. At first it looked like all the buildings were "ways," which are collections of nodes (points) and can represent buildings as well as roads. So I looked for tags on the ways to identify the structures. Then I noticed that my query didn't pick up some buildings - especially ones that have interior borders (holes) - and found that there are also "relations." Relations seem to be collections of ways, one way per border. They can have the tags to represent buildings too. After I got all that worked out, I noticed that my query was still missing a few places. Some buildings were entered as nodes sitting in the middle of the area that borders the actual building, with tags on that individual node.

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