Hi,
I am looking at some data and I see that many way entries don’t have any attributes for city or country. E.g., I see “Tremont St” which is in Boston but there is no city name which would allow me to create the address like this: “Tremont St, Boston”.
I understand that the data is not complete, so is this simply missing or is there a way to get that info for a way?
Cheers,
Markus
You can use the “is_in” key to describe what suburb, city or country a way or node is located in. See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:is_in
As you surmise, it is recommended that this tag be used to aid searching or disambiguation, but it has not been used as widely as it could have.
Determining in which city a road is located can be done much smarter then just adding is_in tags to every road. For most cities boundaries are available so using the boundary, the way position and a little math you can work out if it’s inside or outside the city. Same applies to provinces, countries, continents etc.