When processing places of worship for the National Crisis Center (Belgium), I run into the problem that it’s quite hard to filter just “significant” places of worship from OSM. We’re interested in places where it’s likely that regular services take place, or that get regular crowds (e.g. weddings & funerals). But it’s hard to remove all the little wayside crosses or chapels that are just not relevant because their tagging is too limited.

uMap with all the places of worship that could not be classified

To do so, we start from all places with https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity=place_of_worship. For our search area (Belgium + areas we have projects in + a buffer), that give us about 45.000 locations.

My initial strategy was to then exclude “obviously small places”. There’s three tags we can use for that:

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