this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
11 points (100.0% liked)

OpenStreetMap community

5278 readers
9 users here now

Everything #OpenStreetMap related is welcome: software releases, showing of your work, questions about how to tag something, as long as it has to do with OpenStreetMap or OpenStreetMap-related software.

OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.

Join OpenStreetMap and start mapping: https://www.openstreetmap.org/.

There are many communication channels about OSM, many organized around a certain country or region. Discover them on https://openstreetmap.community/

https://mapcomplete.org/ is an easy-to-use website to view, edit and add points (such as shops, restaurants and others)

https://learnosm.org/en/ has a lot of information for beginners too.

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I like searching for POIs via a query language on Overpass. My queries tend to be quite simple - "get all amenities of x type, in y area that have z tag". The rendered map showing matching POIs is a nice-to-have, but not completely necessary.

What is the best way to do this offline, on Linux? (ideally using software already packaged for Debian, but that's not vital).

I'm imagining a REPL that I can pass a downloaded map to, and then can query and see the results (in an ideal world, rendering them too).

It seems database schemas are close to what I want, but they seem to be designed more for people doing large scale complex queries and building bespoke databases just with the information they want.

Are these tools a good fit for my use case, or is there is a better/simpler way?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] SomeoneElse@en.osm.town 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

@ambitiousslab Just follow one of the "server" guides at switch2osm.org, but don't bother with the rendering bit.
You can add extra database columns easily (if you want extra keys).
"on Linux" might cover anything from a greeting card to a supercomputer, but assuming you're on something resempling a PC and don't want to query the entire world, this should work.

[โ€“] ambitiousslab@feddit.uk 1 points 1 week ago

Thanks for the tip! Your assumptions are correct.

Someone else suggested osmium tags-filter on the downloaded PBF files (which are ~150 MB), and that's working well at the moment. I'll keep this in mind as I'm presuming that importing into a database will be more efficient in case I ever increase the size of the map I'm working with.