Key:is_in - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Key:is_in
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Key:is in
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is_in
Description
The is_in tag is used to index where a place or feature is.
Group:
boundaries
Used on these
elements
Useful combination
name
=*
Status:
in use
is_in
More details at tag
info
Tools for this tag
taginfo
AD
AT
BE
BR
BY
CH
CN
CZ
DE
DK
FI
FR
GB
GR
HU
IE (N+S)
IN
IR
IT
LI
LU
JP
KP
KR
NL
NO
PL
PT
RU
ES
AR
MX
CO
BO
CL
EC
PY
PE
UY
VE
TW
UA
US
VN
overpass-turbo
QLever
Postpass via overpass-turbo
OSM Tag History
The
is_in
=*
tag is used to index where a place or feature is located, especially when administrative boundary relations cannot provide this information. In some regions, where all administrative boundaries are fully mapped, this tag is no longer required.
Also see related keys:
is_in:city
=*
is_in:town
=*
is_in:suburb
=*
is_in:village
=*
etc.
Contents
When to use?
Description
For making categories
Improving accuracy
See also
Tag "is_in"
6.1
Rationale
Deprecation of "is_in"
See also
References
When to use?
The
is_in
tag is one of OpenStreetMap's earliest tags, and is still in common use even though usage has been falling consistently since 2014. At its peak, about 4 million of those tags were used, but only 500K are left as of 2024
The
is_in
tag pre-dates boundary polygons. When a region has a well developed set of boundary polygons the information that could be placed in the
is_in
tag on an object can usually be derived from the boundaries that contain it, in which case the information in the tag seems redundant. Some contributors have advocated deleting this tag because they see it as equivalent to the boundary information. Other contributors consider that view to be short-sighted at best.
The tag still can contain important information when boundaries aren't fully developed. It may also be used to associate small places, such as neighborhoods or suburbs which belong to a larger place such as a town or a city, which is not represented as an official administrative boundary.
As of March 2019,
JOSM
recommends deleting this tag and all its variations
as no longer needed.
Description
This tag lets you specify, with words, where a place or feature is in the world. It can be used with anything, pubs, buildings, streets, parks, zoos
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 may be done by processing boundary information. In the past, the following was proposed to be used as an alternative:
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 that these are valid, too, although not recommended:
name
SOMA
is_in
USA;CA;California;San Francisco
or
name
SOMA
is_in
San Francisco
For making categories
See also
Relations are not 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.
See also
Proposed features/capital
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?
Boundary relations
are one solution, and also solve a redundancy issue, i.e. it is a waste writing
is_in
Sweden,Stockholms län,Stockholm
for every street in Stockholm, when we can just use 3 boundary relations for Stockholm, Stockholms län, and Sweden, without having to tag each street with lengthy tags. However many boundaries are difficult to trace exactly (notably in developing countries) and for building them they have to be estimated or these relations may be known incompletely. Tagging individual elements may be a temporary solution until a set of necessary boundaries is setup and refined with enough accuracy and completion.
Another solution is to 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 the 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 of the above:
is_in:city
Canberra
Any of the place keys can be used as qualifiers:
is_in:continent
=*
(dubious for reasons described on its page)
is_in:ocean
=*
(proposed, extremely low usage)
is_in:sea
=*
(proposed, extremely low usage)
is_in:archipelago
=*
(proposed)
is_in:island
=*
is_in:country
=*
is_in:state
=*
is_in:municipality
=*
is_in:city
=*
… town, suburb, village, hamlet, locality
In most cases these specialized tags are only there to help qualify existing data, when the boundaries:
are still incomplete or could be ambiguous (when they overlap), or
are almost impossible to draw correctly and accurately (e.g. continents, seas, mountains or mountain ranges, valleys, many forests with weak visible separations, glaciers, ice shelves, plateaux, cultural regions...) or
to structure exactly due to disagreements in classifications such as archipelagos.
Even country borders may be weak in some disputed areas, where some features located there may be tagged in one country, while others would be tagged in another (some disputed areas are either overlapping, or are mapped separately even if they do not match a governing country, and there exist some joint areas managed in condominiums, or with administrations alternating every few months, as well as some areas claimed by no country at all because of disputes on nearby larger areas).
Using
is_in:*
tags will not help resolve these territorial disputes, but using boundary relations permits overlaps.
OSM data is not the place to decide territorial disputes, and will not be made to hide these disputes by showing different data depending on country of residence of its users.
However only disputes for claims made by official governments or significant local minorities with some form of government should be in OSM, using relevant sources (e.g. international treaties or UN decisions recognized by some countries, even if they are contested or interpreted differently by others). For these cases, using overlapping boundaries is highly preferable and users should not alter the boundaries for claims made by other communities on the same area, even if this causes some ambiguities or (expected) duplicate data in searches (these duplicates or overlaps may be signaled by some "Quality Assurance" tools, but only as warnings: they are
not
errors if territorial disputes have not been arbitrated and agreed internationaly and should not be
corrected
in such cases). Instead, users of data just need to use more selective tags for filtering the results in their queries.
See also
Relations/Proposed/Is_In
Relations/Relations are not Categories
Changeset#Tags on changesets
Tag "is_in"
Examples
Bedford
place
town
name
Bedford
is_in
Bedfordshire;England;UK
Ryde
place
village
name
Ryde
is_in
England;Isle of Wight
Denmark
place
country
name
Denmark
is_in
Europe;Scandinavia
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
This is already accomplished automatically without the use of is_in tag in
Nominatim
, the latest search engine.
Deprecation of "is_in"
The following countries no longer use
is_in
=*
and related keys. Please do not add them in the following countries:
Country
TagInfo
tracker
Notes
Australia
Link
Australia
removed
nearly all remaining examples in early-2024. Most residual examples are protected marine areas in Australian maritime waters.
Belgium
Link
Belgium
removed
all remaining examples in 2020. Most residual examples in the TagInfo tracker are from neighbouring Germany.
Greece
Link
Greece
removed
all remaining examples in mid-2020.
Indonesia
Link
Indonesia
removed
all "is_in" tag in 11 December 2025.
Malta
Link
Malta did not see widespread usage of "is_in" as with other countries (
source
): nearly all examples were gone by mid-2024, with the last two examples
removed
on 11 March 2025.
Netherlands
Link
The European part of the Netherlands
phased out
"is_in" from 2019 to 2021: see
discussion
for more information. Like Belgium, most residual examples are from neighbouring Germany.
Norway
Link
Norway
removed
nearly all remaining examples in 2023.
Spain
Link
Spain
removed
nearly all examples in 2019: most residual examples in the TagInfo tracker are from neighbouring France and Portugal.
See also
object:*
=*
References
Retrieved from "
Categories
Key descriptions for group "boundaries"
Key descriptions
Key descriptions with status "in use"
Boundaries
Data standards
Hidden categories:
Pages unavailable in French
Pages unavailable in Italian
Pages unavailable in Dutch
Tag and key pages with missing images
Item with no description in language FR
Item with no description in language IT
Item with no description in language UK
Item with no description in language FI
Item with no description in language NL
Item with no description in language HU
Item with no description in language ZH-HANS
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