How to retrieve natural features of a certain GeoLocation with OSM?

Question

In a node web-application I need to find out, what the natural features of the location of the user are. I know the longitude and latitude of a user and I found out, that the tag natural holds information like water, rock or grass which would suffice for my applicatiton. As I understand, not every single GeoLocation holds this kind of information.

My research so far got me to consider the OSM-APIs Overpass API and the XAPI (whereas Xappy.JS which I would prefer using for my nodejs-project, seems to be down currently) as both their key-goals are, to provide information rather than edit geo-information.

I am still not sure, if I can simply get natural features, only providing a Geo-Location, or maybe a rectangle, without having to download surrounding map-data beforehand.

My question is: Which API would you recommend to use for this? Maybe you can give any recommendations on what specific functionality I need to look for.

Answer 1

Retrieving natural features from OSM via the Overpass API is surely a possible solution. See this example query using overpass turbo (which is just a nice web-frontend for the Overpass API).

Note that the Overpass API supports XML and JSON and that overpass turbo adds some more file formats.

Also do note that there might be other interesting keys apart from the natural key. Take a look at the map features which roughly correspond to the most commonly used tags. Additionally, there is taginfo where you can find even more tags.