[OSM-dev] User-friendly interface to OSM POIs

[Mike N.]

> But say someone types in "restaurants". I'm not sure how to transition
> from that to a meaningful OSM query.
>
> So I'm wondering how people have implemented this, if anyone in fact
> has?

   In the case of a Smartphone for POI search, a list of categories is the 
best method rather than requiring typing.   For OSM data, you would query 
using Xapi http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Xapi .

> Right now it seems like I'd have to map common words like
> "restaurant" to combinations of tag queries. Has anyone created such a
> list of category keywords and mappings? Many can be intelligently
> handled I'm sure, but there are likely quite a few that would need to
> search multiple tag combinations to provide the most meaningful results.

   I haven't seen anyone do this properly (in my opinion).   For Gastronomy 
for example, I'd like to see combined results of
 amenity=restaurant
 amenity=fast_food
 amenity=food_court
 amenity=ice_cream
 amenity=café
 amenity=pub
 amenity=bar

  So, you might either get all amenity= with Xapi and filter internally, or 
have a multiple-amenity query.  You'll need to query for both nodes and 
ways.    Some people may prefer to directly query directly for one of the 
above categories.