[OSM-talk] What Streets are in what Places

[Peter Childs]

I'm trying to find away to place streets in to places, so I can
automatcally know the xxx street is in xxx town.

However in OSM places are points not area's and the areas we do have
are either to do with admin (ie Counties, Borough's etc) and hence are
rather less than helpful.

The is_in tag is not a lot of use either due to it being inconsistent.

I could do it with some kind of nearest function but I don't think
this is going to give me the right answer either.

What is in a place, is often to do with other geographic features,
like gaps in housing, majro roads etc, and also to do with history,

What I would like to do is write a script that takes the planet and
gives a list of the places (towns, villages etc) and a polygon/area
for each place.

While I don't think this list would be worth piping back in to the
database, it might be useful for knowing what were missing.....

Maybe Places should be area's rather than points anyway.

I'm, quite happy for the places to overlap I can think of more than
one place where some small village has been overrun by the next large
town. and while the village still exists as a row of small shops its
now see by most as part of the larger town.

Any ideas.

Peter.