Is there a way to find the date when a certain key was added to an amenity in OpenStreetMaps?

Question

As an example: I'd like to know, when was the Key "tourism" added (or last edited) of this amenities:

http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1N4

I tried with different APIs but didn't get very far.

Is there a way over any API or do I have to get as SQL Snapshot and somehow look for the last changeset?

Answer 1

You can use the history call of the main OSM API if you know the IDs of the objects wich you want to inspect. The resulting XML includes all versions of the respective object, thus allows one to determine when certain changes were made:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/node/277528308/history

Answer 2

Overpass API supports these kinds of queries since version 0.7.50. Referring to the History API call or extracting that details from a full history planet wouldn't be necessary anymore.

Please refer to this post with more details on diff and adiff keywords.

As the overpass database rebuild is still ongoing, I'll add a working example to this post a bit later. At the moment, June 2014 would be the earliest possible starting date for queries.