Is there any single way to get information about administrative entities? It seems to me that there is a class of map users who are interested in admin entities. Perhaps they are interested in city boundaries. In the US, there may also be school districts, water districts and open space districts.

Once one has an id of some relation, it seems ok to get information about that entity.

But I have tried a couple of times to discover how to find these entities and I keep hitting a wall.

I can construct OverPass queries for these things, but they do not work and it is hard to see why they do not work. It is sort of like that old joke: How many prolog programmers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? false.

Here are queries I have tried:

relation [“boundary”=”administrative”] [“is_in:country”=”USA”] [“is_in:state”=”CA”] [“admin_level”=”8”] [“border_type”=”city”]; out body;

result:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <osm version="0.6" generator="Overpass API">
 <note>The data included ....</note>
 <meta osm_base="2015-07-09T21:00:02Z"/>
 
 </osm>

Hm. Not too helpful.

relation [“is_in:country”=”USA”] [“is_in:state”=”CA”] [“admin_level”=”8”] [“border_type”=”city”]; out body;

relation [“is_in:country”=”USA”] [“is_in:state”=”CA”] [“border_type”=”city”]; out body;

Nothing…..

relation [“is_in:country”=”USA”] [“is_in:state”=”CA”] [“name”=”Ramon Road”]; out body;

relation [“is_in:country”=”USA”] [“is_in:state”=”CA”] [“name”=”Sunnyvale”]; (._;>;); out body;