Dr. Ollie

This actor lets you extract structured OpenStreetMap (OSM) data—such as restaurants, schools, parks, or any other tagged feature—within a given area and present it as a clean, tabular dataset. Instead of manually browsing maps, you simply provide either a place name (e.g., “Berlin, Germany”) or an exact bounding box (south,west,north,east). If you supply a place name, the actor automatically geocodes it via the Nominatim API to determine the corresponding latitude/longitude rectangle; otherwise, it uses your bounding box directly.

Next, choose one of the most common OSM tag keys (for example, “amenity,” “shop,” “tourism,” or “leisure”) and enter the specific value you want to filter by (e.g., “restaurant,” “school,” “hotel,” or “park”). The actor dynamically builds an Overpass QL query that retrieves all matching nodes, ways, and relations within your area. Behind the scenes, it sends this query to the Overpass API endpoint of OSM and requests results in JSON format.

Once the data returns, the actor parses each element’s tags and geometry, extracting key fields such as:

name (the object’s official name, if available) street, housenumber, postcode, city, country amenity, tourism, shop, etc. (the tag that matched your query) phone, website, operator, and other common metadata Latitude/Longitude (for nodes) or centroid coordinates (for ways and relations)

All retrieved features are output as a table where each row corresponds to one OSM element. Because OSM is community-maintained, you often discover rich, up-to-date details—such as neighborhood cafés, small clinics, or local parks—that commercial APIs might not list. The resulting dataset can be downloaded as JSON or CSV and easily integrated into data pipelines, reporting dashboards, GIS applications, or mapping visualizations.