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

Question

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...

Answer 1

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.

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

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