Open Street Map

What is Open Street Map?

Open Street Map (OSM) is an incredibly powerful open-source geospatial platform, backed by a community of mappers. The OSM project provides a free usable map of the entire world, which is constantly updated and refined by a dedicated and growing community. OSM's community-driven approach to mapping has resulted in a detailed map of the world, filled with a truly incredible set of array of POIs. In fact, it is so good that the project has become the backbone of many of the largest tech companies. Apple, Amazon, Facebook and others all rely on Open Street Map to support their mapping products.

One of the most exciting parts of Open Street Map is the Overpass API, a read-only API for querying parts of the OSM map data like Points of Interest (POIs). Even better, there are publicly available servers that host instances of the Overpass API. As a data scientist, this gives shocking access to map data across the US. You can use the Overpass API to query for all restaurants in the United States. Or all banks. Or all water fountains. And because the data in Overpass has contributions from the major tech companies, it is shockingly comprehensive.

However, just because it has a public API doesn't mean it is useful. Overpass servers are notoriously slow. And the query interface is incredibly complex, even for technical users. To use it effectively, you need to understand the difficulty between "nodes" and "ways", the difference in categorization between "leisure" and "amenity", and the inner workings of XML. For example, here is the query that you would need to pass to Overpass to determine the location of mailboxes across the country:

[out:json][timeout:25];
(
  node["amenity"="post_box"]({{bbox}});
  way["amenity"="post_box"]({{bbox}});
  relation["amenity"="post_box"]({{bbox}});
);
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

What have we done?

We've ingested, processed, structured, and exposed all POIs in the US available on Open Street Map. And we've made them available with simple queries in Column's API. You can now search them both by category and POI name.

For example, you can now use Column's API to find all banks in the US. Or water fountains. Or restaurants using the POI Category search.

Or, if you want to query for a specific POI, you can Query by POI to run searching against a specific brand.

Working with Column on Open Streetmap Data

If you're interested in building with our OpenStreetmap dataset, reach out to [email protected] and we would love to collaborate with you.