[OSM-talk] Area tags in Overpass API

[Tobias Knerr]

Hi all,

as of now, Overpass API has limited support for area queries: There is a
whitelist¹ of cases where relations and closed ways are treated as
areas. Most of the time it requires a name in addition to certain other
tags. Specifically, I stumbled upon the limitation that closed ways with
a building key are only treated as an area if they have a name (and use
the "yes" building value).

This topic came up on help.osm.org², but Roland asked me to take it
here. So is there anyone besides me who thinks that being able to use
area queries would be useful for features beyond the current whitelist?

I'm also curious about the motivation for considering only a strictly
limited subset of the areas in the database in the first place.
Presumably this is because maintaining a large number of areas would be
detrimental to performance?

Tobias

¹ https://github.com/drolbr/Overpass-API/blob/master/rules/areas.osm3s
²
https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/20841/how-to-query-all-elements-within-an-outline-way-from-overpass-api