This map shows the occurrence of street and place names in Europe, enabling insights into local peculiarities as well as historical and political similarities and differences.
How to use the tool
Enter a name in the search field and press Enter or click the search button. If you zoom in, the names of streets or places are displayed.
A minimum of 5 characters is required for street names, and a minimum of 3 characters for place names.
The underscore character is a wildcard for any character
The percent sign is a wildcard for any sequence of characters
Goethe% finds Goetheplatz, Goethestraße...
%Goethe% finds Goetheplatz, Goethestraße, Via Goethe...
%Anne_Frank% finds Anne-Frank-Straße, Rue Anne Frank...
Examples
How this tool was made
Starting with the 23 GB European subset of OpenStreetMap data (provided by Geofabrik), information on streets or places was extracted using osmium. Ways were reduced to points using osmconvert. The data were imported into a PostgreSQL database using imposm and indexed to enabla fast search access. The site is designed using jQuery. The vector-based map and the points are created by Mapbox GL JS.
By the way...
I took advantage of components I had created for other purposes earlier, so this little tool war completed rather quickly. Only afterwards did I find out that at least for German street names, there is an awesome site created by Zeit Online, which is also based on OpenStreetMap data.
