Key:place - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Key:place
From OpenStreetMap Wiki
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Help
Key:place
In other languages
Afrikaans
asturianu
azərbaycanca
Bahasa Indonesia
Bahasa Melayu
bosanski
brezhoneg
català
čeština
Crnogorski
dansk
eesti
Esperanto
euskara
Frysk
Gàidhlig
galego
hrvatski
Ido
interlingua
íslenska
italiano
Kreyòl ayisyen
kréyòl gwadloupéyen
kurdî
latviešu
Lëtzebuergesch
lietuvių
magyar
Nederlands
norsk
norsk nynorsk
occitan
polski
português
română
sardu
shqip
slovenčina
slovenščina
srpski (latinica)
suomi
svenska
Tagalog
Tiếng Việt
Türkçe
Zazaki
Ελληνικά
беларуская
български
македонски
монгол
русский
српски / srpski
українська
հայերեն
עברית
العربية
سرائیکی
فارسی
پنجابی
پښتو
नेपाली
मराठी
हिन्दी
বাংলা
ਪੰਜਾਬੀ
தமிழ்
മലയാളം
සිංහල
ไทย
မြန်မာဘာသာ
한국어
ქართული
ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ
中文（简体）
中文（繁體）
粵語
Other languages...
place
Description
Defines the center or outline of a named place
Group:
places
Used on these
elements
Documented values:
31
Requires
name
=*
Useful combination
population
=*
wikidata
=*
wikipedia
=*
admin_level
=*
source
=*
See also
boundary
administrative
boundary
place
admin_level
=*
Relation:boundary
Status:
de facto
place
More details at tag
info
Tools for this tag
taginfo
AD
AT
BE
BR
BY
CH
CN
CZ
DE
DK
FI
FR
GB
GR
HU
IE (N+S)
IN
IR
IT
LI
LU
JP
KP
KR
NL
NO
PL
PT
RU
ES
AR
MX
CO
BO
CL
EC
PY
PE
UY
VE
TW
UA
US
VN
overpass-turbo
QLever
Postpass via overpass-turbo
OSM Tag History
Main article:
Places
Used to indicate that a particular location is known by a particular name, to indicate what sort of "place" it is. A place tag should exist for every significant human settlement (city, town, suburb, etc.) regardless of administrative status, and also for notable unpopulated, named places.
Contents
Usage
1.1
Nodes
1.2
Areas
1.2.1
Mapping populated places as areas
1.3
Additional tags
Values
2.1
Administratively declared places
2.2
Populated settlements, urban
2.3
Populated settlements, urban and rural
2.4
Other places
2.5
Additional attributes
Relationship with admin_level
Official place classifications
Usage
Nodes
The simplest and most widespread way to map most place types is to position a
node
roughly at its centre (for a populated place having a central town hall, square or similar, preferably there).
Areas
If a place has a fairly well defined and
verifiable
outline it can make sense to map it as an
area
. This allows to precisely define the extent of the place, which can be very helpful for example when using
Nominatim
for address queries etc (as the results returned otherwise can often be quite confusing because of "noise" from nearby, but unrelated, place nodes ).
Note that for some applications, in particular for routing programs, not having a well placed centre node can cause problems because they'll then have to calculate a "centroid" from the area geometry, which in some cases can be very inaccurate. For smaller populated places (hamlets, villages, small towns) this is rarely a significant problem though (as most people would usually just want to be navigated
to
the place, not necessarily to some random mappers pick of a "centre" in it).
place
island
and
place
islet
for example typically have a well defined outline and no defined centre so they are normally mapped as areas. Very large places like
place
continent
place
ocean
and
place
sea
are by convention always mapped as nodes.
Mapping populated places as areas
Populated places (in particular
place
city
place
town
place
village
place
hamlet
and
place
isolated_dwelling
) are usually mapped as nodes since in most cases they have a well defined centre but not a
verifiable
outline. Some mappers map populated places as areas nonetheless with the geometry representing one of the following:
The smallest administrative unit the place is part of and that fully includes the place. This often conflicts with the administratively declared places listed below and often includes areas that are not commonly considered part of the populated place.
An aggregate/merger of urban landuses that are considered to belong to the place. This creates difficulties in particular in regions with larger agglomerations and connected settlements where it is often not clear where exactly one place starts and another one ends.
An approximate hull polygon drawn around all parts of the populated place but not meant to represent a meaningful outline.
Because of the lack of verifiability and the different conflicting ideas for the meaning of the outline and because the well defined centre of the place which is useful and important for many applications is not part of such mapping, it is not advisable for mappers to map populated places as areas but to map them as nodes. Data users should not expect the area geometries of populated places to have a particular meaning.
Populated places mapped only as areas do not render in the
openstreetmap-carto
stylesheets. This is intentional, as documented at the
Openstreetmap Carto GitHub project
. Settlements mapped as areas are rendered in some other maps (e.g. Osmand, Mapscii, Transport Map, Mapbox).
Populated places are sometimes mapped as both areas and nodes to record both the outline and the point that is commonly understood to be the centre. When a settlement is mapped both as an area and as a node, the two can be combined into a relation to make clear they refer to the same place: When the area corresponds to an administrative boundary, the place node can be added to the relation with a
label
role (
example
). When the boundary is not an administrative boundary (but can still be verified), use
boundary
place
instead (
example
).
Additional tags
If you have a way of knowing the population of a place (from a free data source), the
population
=*
tag typically is added to the same object the place tag appears on.
Also useful is the addition of
wikidata
=*
wikipedia
=*
Values
This is a table showing commonly used place=* tags separated into categories.
See
Generic:Map Features:place
Administratively declared places
LOADING TAG LIST...
(If you do not see this tag list, you need to enable JavaScript)
This table is auto-generated. See
Template:Taglist
for a documentation on it.
This table is a wiki template with a default description in English.
Editable here
Populated settlements, urban
LOADING TAG LIST...
(If you do not see this tag list, you need to enable JavaScript)
This table is auto-generated. See
Template:Taglist
for a documentation on it.
This table is a wiki template with a default description in English.
Editable here
Populated settlements, urban and rural
LOADING TAG LIST...
(If you do not see this tag list, you need to enable JavaScript)
This table is auto-generated. See
Template:Taglist
for a documentation on it.
This table is a wiki template with a default description in English.
Editable here
Other places
LOADING TAG LIST...
(If you do not see this tag list, you need to enable JavaScript)
This table is auto-generated. See
Template:Taglist
for a documentation on it.
This table is a wiki template with a default description in English.
Editable here
Additional attributes
LOADING TAG LIST...
(If you do not see this tag list, you need to enable JavaScript)
This table is auto-generated. See
Template:Taglist
for a documentation on it.
This table is a wiki template with a default description in English.
Editable here
Relationship with admin_level
When a place is also a level of government with the exact same extension, it should be tagged with
admin_level
=*
. Generally place entities tend to differ from administrative entities of the same name because the administrative entities contain areas outside the settlement, like fields and forests. The exact level varies significantly from country to country; but as an approximation, places line up with admin levels as follows:
Place
Admin level
country
2–3
state, province, region
3–5
district, county
4–8
subdistrict, municipality
6–8
city
6–9
town, village, hamlet
7–10
borough, suburb
8–10
quarter, neighbourhood, block
8–11
The vast majority of
place
country
correspond with
admin_level
place
country
with
admin_level
is rare and may occur for non-sovereign countries with high degrees of autonomy, for example the constituent countries of the
Kingdom of the Netherlands
Official place classifications
In general, the main
place
=*
classification scheme creates a place hierarchy somewhat independent of the particular terms used by local legal systems. Although some local communities attempt to reconcile official designations with this classification scheme, it is unable to express most of the official distinctions across countries and cultures. For places associated with administrative areas, these distinctions are most often tagged on the administrative boundary relation using a key such as
border_type
=*
. However, there are
several alternative approaches
, including a few subkeys of
place
=*
🇨🇳 China:
place:CN
=*
🇫🇷 France:
place:fr
=*
🇵🇭 Philippines:
place:PH
=*
Retrieved from "
Categories
Key descriptions for group "places"
Key descriptions
Key descriptions with status "de facto"
Tags claimed to be for nodes, areas and relations
Places
Addresses
Top-level keys
Hidden categories:
Item with no description in language FI
Item with no description in language ZH-HANS
Item with no description in language ZH-HANT
Translate to Esperanto
Navigation menu
US