I'm not really interested in generating tiles if I can help it. Instead, what I'm looking for is a means of getting "what is near me" kind of information, specifically bodies of water and green space, or even civil services.
If I had the map tiles, I suppose I could parse them for the colours I want, but I'm thinking that there must be a better/smarter way. Isn't is possible to get a list of objects near lat,lng
that belong to categories A
and B
?
I'm a competent Python programmer, but am completely new to OSM. I understand that I can download a Very Large XML file and have all the data, but accessing it, especially for this sort of purpose is totally foreign to me.
I should however that I have at my disposal complete access to a PostgreSQL database complete with PostGIS in a GeoDjango setup.