If I want to search for drinking fountains along my planned running route, or to search for where I can park my bicycle, how do I do that?
Obviously they’re the type of more niche tag that may not be added everywhere it theoretically should be, but the tags do exist. But if I search for “drinking water”, it takes me to eastern Paris, and if I search “bicycle parking”, it takes me to northern Sri Lanka.
More generally, how do I search for specific types of amenities, operators, etc. which may not show up as an address (or where I don’t know or care for the address)?
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Oh nice, that’s awesome!
Is there a way to access it from within OSM? Or from any OSM-based apps? It’s really cool that that exists as a back-end, but it’s not especially user-friendly and I imagine it would be a nightmare to try to find and use on a phone. Especially if you don’t know the code for the amenity name, since it lacks any autocompletion/suggestion.
“within OSM” – not clear what you are asking for, OSM is just a database of geographical data
“from any OSM-based apps” – most of them should have their own user-friendly search features, I know OsmAnd does, so you can use that.
not clear what you are asking for
On the actual OSM website, on the official OSM front-end. https://www.openstreetmap.org/
That, to me, makes it more than “just” a database.
most of them should have their own user-friendly search features
I tried CoMaps, and my search for “bike parking” seems to have worked perfectly…once I figured out the trick to it (which is to ignore all the regular results that come up, and press the small “view on map” icon). Water seemed…less consistent, though that might be because of some weirdness with how things are classified. It led me to notice there seem to be 3 separate ways taps might be labelled…
man_made=water_tap(as well asman_made=drinking_fountain),drinking_water=yes, and (the only one I was previously aware of)amenity=drinking_water.It’s more than a little frustrating that this means that unless every editor is consistently applying all three results, different subsets will turn up on any given search. And this is made worse by OSM’s front end, while creating a Point, including “water tap” and “drinking water”, depending on what you search for.
edit: wait, I found another related tag.
fountain=bubblerThe openstreetmap.org website has a search feature but I think its abilities to search for kinds of POIs are limited. I never use it for that, only to search for names.
You discovered what I meant in CoMaps. Maybe your experience could be turned into a feature request for it.
Maybe your experience could be turned into a feature request for it.
Maybe. I think it may actually be more useful for the OSM front end to improve its editor experience though, so what a user entering data is prompted with is more likely to result in consistent data.
