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This is my first time posting here so please forgive me if i ask a trivial question. Is there a way of obtaining the type of road an object is settled in from a request via nominatim? (i have the geocoded sample)

For example: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=xml&lat=52.5487429714954&lon=-1.81602098644987&zoom=18&addressdetails=1

does provide me with loads of info. yet, there is no info on the road the address is settled in. would like to obtain something like: rural road or even just grade*N* (where N stands for the level of hierarchy.) i hope what i'm looking for is understandable :) thanks in advance!

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    I think road hierarchy is usually a jurisdictional manner in the true transportation sense. You're best bet is to contact your local transportation agency or the agency responsible for the data and get their GIS classification scheme + layer. I'm not sure about the UK, but in North America a lot of this data is available online for free.
    – dassouki
    Aug 28, 2012 at 16:03

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The hierarchy of roads is reflected in OSM by the "highway" field. Possible values in hierarchical order are: motorway, trunk , primary, secondary, tertiary, unclassified, residential, service, track, path

See this wiki pages: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway:International_equivalence http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway_tag_usage

highway=road is default for unknown classification (e.g. if only digitized by aerial photo).

BUT: It is allowed to change highway type in order to reflect the importance for routing purposes.

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  • Thank you @Andre Joost for your helpful remarks. However, the highway field is not supplied within the xml document returned from a request via nominatim. therefore my question was rather related to how to obtain this information from an API or something similar.
    – Seb
    Aug 29, 2012 at 14:57
  • Thats true, but you get the osm_id. With that you can query the full information of the way element: openstreetmap.org/browse/way/<osm_id> or openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/way/<osm_id> . But keep in mind that the Openstreetmap api is not designed for extensive querying.
    – AndreJ
    Aug 29, 2012 at 15:20
  • Other possibility: get the Geofabrik roads shapefile of your country, and look up the osm_id. Road class is in the "type" column.
    – AndreJ
    Aug 31, 2012 at 9:50
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    It wouldn't work. Because Nominatim have returned id of way for building (osm_id="90394420" is a building) not for Pilkington Avenue. And it's residential, not road.
    – dmitry.v.kiselev
    Mar 11, 2015 at 13:02
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You can't do it in one query, but, you can get Nominatim place_id and use details.php

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=73626440

and parse highway information.

Pilkington Avenue (Type: highway:residential, way 218846952, 15, 0 GOTO)

But, Nominatim's wiki says:

Currently the details page (details.php) creates a high load on the server and is only intended as a debugging aide, as a result no xml api is currently provided. Scraping or heavy use is likely to result in an IP ban.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim#Details_.2F_Gazetteer

So you if you planed to use this approach often, you will need to setup your own Nominatim or another geocoder instance.

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It appears to be undocumented, but you can put lat,lon in the q parameter for search.php and it seems to function as a reverse geocoder and return type information. Try pasting lat,lon into the query box on http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org

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