Key:is_in

+/- is_in Description The is_in tag is used to index where a place or feature is. Group Location Element help Used combinations in World Australia/Oceania Europe (list) Asia (list) Central America (list) South America (list) Africa (list)

Controversy

Please note that this tag is controversial and has sparked many hot discussions on several occasions.

Proponents say that some search-engines are helped by the is_in tag.

Opponents state it is completely redundant because "where" the node is can be derived from border-polygons surrounding the location. Another argument is that the values used for the tag are so inconsistent that it is mostly not usable anyway. Many contributors outright delete these tags as they come across them.

But as always with OSM, what is stated here on the wiki is not the official way to do things. Make up your own mind.

Description

This tag lets you by specify, with words, where a place or feature is in the world. It can be used with anything, pubs, buildings, streets, parks but is most likely to be used with places. It is recommended that it is ALWAYS used with place tags to help some search engines - for example there are several places called San Francisco in the world (Philippines, Spain, USA), but to return only the one in California would required something like:

• name=San Francisco
• is_in=California; CA; USA

Although there is no requirement to write entities in a given order or to list everything, it is recommended that the reading order is from smaller to bigger entities and all full names are used up to the country level. Note these are valid, too, although not recommended:

• name=SOMA
• is_in=USA;CA;California;San Francisco

• name=SOMA
• is_in=San Francisco

For making categories

Less commonly, the tag can also be used to create a category for searching, e.g.

• name=Canberra
• is_in=capital_cities; Australian Capital Territory; ACT; Australia

means that Canberra can now appear in a list of capital cities of the world.

This can most likely be accomplished better with Proposed features/capital --Gorm 15:08, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

See also: Relations are not Categories

Improving accuracy

One weakness of the tag is that it might not be clear to processing programs exactly what each value stands for. In the above examples, is CA the short form for California or Canada? Is capital_cities a place or a category?

Relations is one solution, and also solves a redundancy issue, i.e. it is a waste writing is_in=Sweden,Stockholms län,Stockholm for every street in Stockholm.

Another solution is to use qualify is_in like this:

• name=Canberra
• place=city
• is_in=capital_cities; Australian Capital Territory; ACT; Australia
• is_in:state=Australian Capital Territory
• is_in:state_code=ACT
• is_in:country=Australia (use english name of the country)
• is_in:country_code=AU (ISO 3166-1 two-letter country code, in UPPER CASE to conform with addr:country tag)

Any suburb, road or other feature in Canberra now needs just one tag to imply all the above:

• is_in:city=Canberra

Any of the place keys can be used as qualifiers:

• is_in:continent=*
• is_in:ocean=* (proposed)
• is_in:sea=* (proposed)
• is_in:archipelago=* (proposed)
• is_in:island=*
• is_in:country=*
• is_in:state=*
• is_in:municipality=* (proposed)
• is_in:city=*
• ... town, suburb, village, hamlet, locality

See Also

• Relations/Proposed/Is_In
• Relations/Relations are not Categories
• Changeset#Tags on changesets

Tag "is_in"

• Example Bedford

  place=town

  name=Bedford

  is_in=Bedfordshire; England; UK

• Example Ryde

  place=village

  name=Ryde

  is_in=England;Isle of Wight;Hampshire

• Example Denmark

  place=country

  name=Denmark

  is_in=Europe;Scandinavia

• Example Europe

  place=continent

  name=Europe

  is_in=top_level

Rationale

Basically, this means that programs can auto-generate indexes, of the form:

You are looking at data for Bedfordshire. Go up one level to England or Home Counties. Towns in Bedfordshire are: Ampthill, Bedford, Clapham, Dunstable...

• more importantly when searching by street name, e.g. for 'High Street', it can tell you which of the many results you get back is likely to be the one you want, by saying 'High Street;Fulbourn;Cambridgeshire' and 'High Street;Chapel-en-le-Frith;Derbyshire'. David.earl October 14, 2006

This is already accomplished automatically without the use of is_in tag in Nominatim, the latest search engine. --Gorm 15:08, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, Nominatim is great! Where can i download it for offline navigation on my android with 8 GB sdcard? --Themroc 20:46, 21 May 2011 (BST)

Extended

Not that the is_in tag useable for more than regions you can add geographic things like "The English Channel".

• place=area
• name=Isle of Wight
• is_in=islands;english channel;osm_workshop_locations

Implementations

• Namefinder
• Tags on almien.co.uk
• Traveling Salesman (AdvancedAddressDBPlaceFinder -plugin)