Question

Given a latitude/longitude combination as well as a radius from that point (in km, if it makes a difference), does anybody know of a service/API (or even download) that I can use to obtain a list of all the places, streets etc. from within the circle originating from the latitude/longitude supplied? When I say all the places, I am interested in everything – from bodies of water to schools.

Many thanks for any assistance, it’s greatly appreciated. 🙂

Answer 1

There’s OSMAXPI, a web service protocol which enables some of the things you’re looking for. There are several problems in your case:

1. There’s a way to query OSM data based on a bounding box (so not a circular area defined by a radius).
2. There is a limit of how large the area is and how much data you can fetch with a single query.

The alternative is to download Planet OSM file and set up your own database and API
serving, but this requires a lot of HW resources, since the database is quite large and growing daily.

Also take a look at some other related QA:

• https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/13555/looking-for-a-world-database-with-locations-of-medical-centers-schools-kinderga/13560#13560
• https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/6933/downloading-openstreetmap-data