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Can anyone show me how to get area polygons (just any landmass) with bounding box using Overpass?

I just want to differentiate between water and land - if you think it's better to assume everywhere is dry land and query for polygons of water to specifically render them instead, then please demonstrate this if possible.

EDIT: To clarify, I can't do massive queries (I'm splitting them up into bounding boxes), so I'm really pleased with the relation"type"="boundary"; solution, but I just need to tailor that query to filter out or ignore bodies of water. There must be a query that just returns useful "land only" polygons for a specific bounding box.

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6
  • Are you looking for continents/oceans polygons?
    – dmitry.v.kiselev
    Aug 11, 2015 at 20:19
  • I'm looking for any water polygons at all within the bounding box, so I can render them as filled polygons to distinguish everything else as solid land.
    – HomerPlata
    Aug 12, 2015 at 8:43
  • Similar to this example: stackoverflow.com/questions/25297811/… I just want the simplest way to distinguish land from water, via an Overpass query. I don't particularly mind whether it's the land or the water polygon(s) that I get.
    – HomerPlata
    Aug 12, 2015 at 16:42
  • In such case, try MDHald's solution with overpass-turbo.eu API.
    – dmitry.v.kiselev
    Aug 12, 2015 at 17:09
  • I'm trying, but one solution only gives me a line boundary of the coast (where I actually need a full polygon), and the other gives me polygons that don't care if they encompass water or not.
    – HomerPlata
    Aug 12, 2015 at 17:39

1 Answer 1

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Using Overpass Turbo

To get Admin Boundaries use the Boundary tag 

[out:json];

(
  relation["type"="boundary"]({{bbox}});
);

out body;
>;
out skel qt;

To get the Water use the Water Tag For the water tag add whatever you need in terms of specific water types. The code is below. 

[out:json];

(

  way["natural"="water"]({{bbox}});
  way["natural"="water"]({{bbox}});
  way["water"="lake"]({{bbox}});
  way["natural"="coastline"]({{bbox}});
  way["waterway"="riverbank"]({{bbox}});
);

out body;
>;
out skel qt;
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4
  • Rivers are also modeled using relations, i.e. you'll have to add them to your query for a complete response. The boundary tag query returns all sorts of boundaries, not only admin boundaries.
    – mmd
    Aug 12, 2015 at 14:24
  • This boundary query seemed perfect at first, but then I noticed it doesn't "rule out" bodies of water (eg. draws a polygon including Birkenhead and Liverpool, encompassing the River Mersey). Can this be tweaked to exclude water? How can I get river data from relations?
    – HomerPlata
    Aug 12, 2015 at 15:32
  • I believe you would need to do a clip of some sort with the data using a GIS. As I understand the Administrative boundaries are deployed based on the Geo-Political Boundaries and thus would not follow any natural features. your best bet is to take the data into a GIS and perform a clip on the Admin boundaries using the River.
    – MDHald
    Aug 12, 2015 at 18:41
  • You can always just download the data from Natural Earth Data where you can download the Cultural Data (Boundaries) and the Physical Vectors(Oceans, Lakes, etc)
    – MDHald
    Aug 12, 2015 at 18:54

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