New feature - categorization

Hi everyone,

we’ve gone live with a new feature.

In the components portion of each API result, we now set the key _category so that you can more easily know what kind of thing we’ve matched. In total there are 20 possible categories a result be matched to - though one of those is a (hopefully very rare) fallback value of unknown. Here is the full list.

The _category is set based on the value of _type.

Here’s an example that you’d get back for the query 48.14393,11.57860

      "components": {
        "ISO_3166-1_alpha-2": "DE",
        "ISO_3166-1_alpha-3": "DEU",
        "_category": "commerce",
        "_type": "pub",
        "city": "Munich",
        "continent": "Europe",
        "country": "Germany",
        "country_code": "de",
        "house_number": "7",
        "political_union": "European Union",
        "postcode": "80539",
        "pub": "Schumann's",
        "road": "Odeonsplatz",
        "state": "Bavaria",
        "suburb": "Stadtbezirk 03 Maxvorstadt"
      },

Often we get asked if there is a full list of all possible _type values. Unfortunately there isn’t. Our datasources, most notably OpenStreetMap, are crowdsourced from around the world. Continually. Literally millions of edits per day. And the world is an exceptionally diverse place, so people are adding all sorts of things, including things we have never before anticipated.

Nevertheless, the OSM community is continually working on standards for how things are tagged, and the vast majority of contributions follow those standards, so it is not pure chaos. Nevertheless, our hope was that by grouping things into categories we can help users more easily work with the data our API returns.

Al of this is covered in more detail in the API documentation.

Of course, any grouping will be a bit subjective. Both in terms of which categories the different types should be sorted into, but also which categories should exist at all. This list is our first pass, but (as will all things) of course please feel free to send us your feedback if you think it could be improved.

happy geocoding,

Ed