[laaph]

Can you clarify which API I should be using for data access? My last project involved determining locations parks and rivers, and I ran in to a lot of the same problems. But, if I just want GPS coordinates, I'm not sure where else to go. Mapbox is find for rendering but less so if I want the raw data and use it myself (for a phone application for example).

[Doctor_Fegg]

The Overpass API should be the first call. Alternatively, you can download OSM data and feed it into your own database, which gives you much more flexibility to write the queries you want (http://download.geofabrik.de/ is a good place to download the data for the area you want; osm2pgsql and Osmosis are the two standard tools for loading OSM into a database, usually Postgres/PostGIS, though there are others).

[Piskvorrr]

Overpass?