Overpass Turbo

Published on 2015-3-7 by Michael Stanton

I've been learning about OpenStreetMap and it's wonderful query library Overpass Turbo. Finding things in the real world with a geographical SQL-like language is tremendous fun!

Just to blow your mind, here is a wonderful query (you can run it yourself in Overpass here):

[out:json][timeout:25];
// in the stelvio park
rel(300032);
map_to_area -> .a;
(
  node(area.a)[tourism="alpine_hut"];
  way(area.a)[tourism="alpine_hut"];
  relation(area.a)[tourism="alpine_hut"];
);
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

The query finds all the alpine huts in the Parco Nazionale dello Stelvio, a beautiful national park in Italy. On the Overpass site after pressing the Run button, you'll see a map of the park now decorated with circles indicating the alpine huts.

You can run this query from the command line. Simply paste the text above into a file, say query.ql, and run on the command line with:

query-overpass query.ql

You'll see JSON-formatted output with all the data. For more fun, pipe it to geojsonio:

query-overpass query.ql | geojsonio

This will display the results in your browser, and you can see table formatted data. You can also pipe text to query-overpass for really simple usage.

The goal of all this, for me, is to learn how to efficiently extract data from OpenStreetMap for a hiking project I'm working on. One of the tricky things for my work is that I need to define area queries in a deft way, since bounding-boxes for my hike are too large. The hike is diagonal across the alps, and instead of managing a series of overlapping bounding-box queries I want to use named areas so I can execute queries like the Stelvio National Park query above.

The essential reference manuals for doing this work are the Overpass Query Language, the taxonomy of OpenStreetMap metadata (Map Features), and a good tag database browser, TagInfo.

Finally, use the open source QGIS geographical information system software to look at everything in one place. It natively integrates with OpenStreetMap.

About that query

I didn't explain the query at all, now let me do that. First off, where did the magic number 300032 come from? Well I needed a bounded area for my query. I went to overpass turbo and ran this query for national parks within a bounding box of northern Italy:

[out:json];
relation[boundary=national_park](45.92822950933618,9.5855712890625,47.2195681123155,11.75811767578125);
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

I found two parks, the Italian one, given by relation id 300032 and a smaller Swiss mark that is connected directly with relation id 113633.

In Overpass, some special handling is required to turn relation boundaries into an area query. First, I query for the relation directly (rel(300032);), and the output of that command serves as input to the next. This is boilerplate to convert a relation to an Overpass area, and to store it in a named set a (map_to_area -> .a;).

Now a disjunction (aka union, aka "or" query), gathers up all nodes, ways and relations within area a that have the tag tourism with the value alpine_hut.

That result is finally sent to output.

City queries

My work is more in the mountains at this point, but cities provide a fertile ground for honing your Overpass query skills. In general I want to get away from bounding boxes and do all searches within meaningful area entities. I looked at my own city of Munich and tried to decipher good area queries. It was surprisingly difficult. First, a visit to the OSM Map Features wiki for a look at the boundary=administrative tag (here). Each country treats these tags somewhat differently. The tag admin_level is important to select the right kind of boundaries. In Germany, level 6 corresponds to a county, level 8 to a town, level 9 to part of a city with a council, and level 10 to a neighborhood. What seems to be a good region for me is the level 9 boundary called Stadtbezirk 01 Altstadt-Lehel. This covers my immediate neighborhood and also includes the inner ring and part of the English Garden. How can I set up an area query that focuses on this region without any magic numbers? It looks like that boundary name is specific enough I don't have to worry about it overlapping with anywhere else in the world, so I'll just make a query like this:

[out:json]
relation[name="Stadtbezirk 01 Altstadt-Lehel"];
map_to_area -> .a;
// gather results
(
  // query part for: “boundary=administrative and admin_level=10”
  node["leisure"="playground"](area.a);
  way["leisure"="playground"](area.a);
);
// print results
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

I chose to save the query in a file, and run it with query-overpass:

> darkstar$ query-overpass playground.ql | json features | json -a id
way/26644286
way/26645889
way/27169996
way/27816952
way/72267502
way/159091655
way/240884789
way/255064926
node/292679754
node/434488823
node/1391483468

Here I'm getting all Unixy, making use of the fact that the output is JSON, and plugging it into a node.js utility (json) to filter the data. Now I can authoritatively say there are 11 playgrounds in my district:

> query-overpass playground.ql | json features | json -a id | wc -l
        11

Hmpf!

Let's go one better. Playgrounds are important to kids and parents, but a nearby coffee shop for the parents is heavenly. Let's try to find coffee shops within 50 meters of a playground. Amazingly, all I have to do is add a line just before printing the playgrounds, to transform them into a list of cafes nearby:

[out:json]
relation[name="Stadtbezirk 01 Altstadt-Lehel"];
map_to_area -> .a;
// gather results
(
  // query part for: “boundary=administrative and admin_level=10”
  node["leisure"="playground"](area.a);
  way["leisure"="playground"](area.a);
);
node(around:50.0)[amenity=cafe];
// print results
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

With a little Unix work, I can just print the names and websites of these cafes:

> query-overpass cafes.ql | json features | json -a properties.tags.name properties.tags.website
Café Dukatz http://www.dukatz.de/
La Stanza http://www.la-stanza.de
Woerner's http://www.woerners.de/
Cafe am Jakobsplatz www.cafe-am-jakobsplatz.de
Petit Café 
Casalingo 
Café Makom http://cafe-makom.de/

See the image at the top of the post for results.

I reckon I've earned a coffee followed by a vigorous workout on a nearby swingset! Happy queries!