This is a static archive of our old OpenStreetMap Help Site. Please post any new questions and answers at community.osm.org.

All places in the world with the same name… search?

Hello community,

I wondered if anyone could tell me if it is possible to find a list of all the places in the world that are named after a specific person? The person in question is Italian, so there are various 'corso', 'piazza', 'via' + name in Italy but I would like to search globally and export that data. I feel like it should be easy but I'm new to the world of mapping...

streetnames names

asked 31 Oct '16, 18:38

Amy K
26●1●1●2
accept rate: 0%

One Answer:

There are many ways to achieve this. You could download the OSM data for the whole world - the so-called "planet file" - and then use a search program on that (for example osmgrp) or load the data into a database and search there. That would give you the maximum flexibility but take a lot of time and resources.

Another option is the "overpass turbo" database which lets you make certain queries directly to a server without having to load the data yourself. A query for "anything where the name contains 'Botticelli'" would look like this:

[out:json][timeout:25];
(
  node["name"~"Botticelli"];
  way["name"~"Botticelli"];
  relation["name"~"Botticelli"];
);
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

Try it out!

If you read up a bit on Overpass Turbo you will be able to refine your query to, for example, query only for buildings or only for streets.

answered 31 Oct '16, 22:35

Frederik Ramm ♦
82.5k●92●720●1273
accept rate: 23%