[OSM-talk] planet.osm powered "where am I"

[Nick Burch]

On Sat, 5 Aug 2006, Nick Burch wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Aug 2006, OJW wrote:
>> Can it do a search for the "centre" location?  e.g. items near bedford, 
>> rather than items near 52.1,-0.5?
>
> Did you intend this to work via an external gazetter service, or via 
> finding a town called bedford in the planet.osm data, and then using 
> that?

Right, this is now supported by another script:
 	http://gagravarr.org/cgi-bin/where_is_it.py

You can supply a place name, and a number of types, and it returns any 
matching places, eg
 	http://gagravarr.org/cgi-bin/where_is_it.py?place=Bath&type=city


>> Can it include only large places (towns/cities) with a wider search area? 
>> e.g. towns in the midlands, or cities in england?
>
> I originally limited the search to 5km, as I didn't want to return too 
> many points.

The limit is now 500km if you supply a node_type / search by place


> Oh, and we could use the wiki for building up nice queries, so people 
> could suggest the best lat+long+distance for the east midlands :)

I've created a wiki page to document the scripts, and collect interesting 
urls. Feel free to add your east midlands one there:
 	http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Where_Are_They


>> Can it format the results as a GPX waypoints file, so that we can upload 
>> the result to a GPS and see local towns or villages on it?
>
> Sure, you can probably do that already with format=osm and a suitable 
> xslt. Adding format=gpx shouldn't be too hard, if someone can suggest 
> what tags we'd need for GPSs to be able to use it (an example file would 
> be great!)

This is now supported, just request format=gpx


I've also noticed that in the July planet.osm, we had:
* 5 cities
* 27 towns
* 84 villages

Hopefully once I we get the August planet.osm, and I load it in, people 
can check around their homes, and add in any place definitions that are 
missing. I'm sure we have contributors from more than 5 cities for 
starters!

Nick