timezone on openstreetmap

The openstreetmap graphical database contains a lot more detail nowadays than just a map of streets. Areas of the world have been identified as either as physcially mapped areas, or relations created form multiple ways. A farily complete set of all administrative boundaries from countires down to local ward and other small political areas. Since timezones are in most cases directly linked to the same administrative areas, adding timezone as a tag to a relation or area allows documenting this information as well.

This is defined on the OSM wiki http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:timezone

Currently 288 timezones are tagging in the database http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/?key=timezone#values which can also be accessed via the right hand window on the wiki page.

In addition to the main OSM logging tools, several other tools are available for inspecting tags in the database. timezone is just one of many thousands of details recorded as tags in the database. The 'Tools for this tag' drop down on the right hand wiki page details.

http://tagstat.hypercube.telascience.org/tagdetails.php?tag=timezone (is currently down)
http://tagwatch.stoecker.eu/ another summary like taginfo
http://tagwatch.stoecker.eu/Central-america/En/keystats_timezone.html for example.

Currently there is not a map showing timezones in the same manor as political maps that many countries use.

http://overpass-turbo.eu/?template=key&key=timezone gives an example of how the database can be queried for particular information. timezone may be a little large for this tool

Editing OSM map data requires a OSM user account, and a number of editors, both on-line and off-line are available to both add and update data. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners_guide

Read only access to the data is also available via the API, http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Query-to-map provides an overview of this but there are many special function websites that use this interface to provide more user friendly access to the data. What it would be nice to provide is a site which will return the data relating to a timezone when supplied with a location as a name or set of coordinates. OSM tile servers will provide a map of the surrounding area, and an openlayers overlay will provide a highlight for each timezone identified in the area.

This is work in progress ...