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pythongeolocationoverpass-apigeonames

Retrieve cities list of a country

Which is the best api to retrieve all the cities in given country? I tried downloading from geonames. but it seems data is not reliable.` Is it possible to query city, along with state and country in overpass api?

Can you please suggest a better way to download cities and its points?

Solution

  • I have done a similar task by making use of overpass api with the help of overpy which is a python package.

    Firstly I have retrieved all states of country using the query

        [out:json];
    area["ISO3166-1"="IN"];
    (rel(area)["admin_level"="4"];);
    out;

    Now I have fetched all districts for each state which is admin_level=5. 

        [out:json];
    area["ISO3166-2"="IN-KL"];
    (rel(area)["admin_level"="5"];);
    out;

    State ISO3166-2is from the data received from the API. Now you can fetch cities for each districts using the data from API.

        [out:json];
    area["ISO3166-2"="{0}"]["admin_level"="4"];
    (rel["name"="Thiruvananthapuram"](area);)->.center;
    node(around.center:10000)["place"];
    out;"""

    This worked for me. Remember fetching all the cities in a country is a really huge task for the OSM Servers. Fetch the data that you really need.