I think you misunderstood me. I perfectly understand the reasons why the API gives the 400 error. <br><br>What I thought was 'insane' however was the attitude that my desire to 'download the whole of London' was somehow not justified rather than just pointing out a temporary shortcoming of the software. Just because it did not work and there was no trivial workaround (apart from download the whole planet, install ruby, install another DB, configure a few scripts...) did not mean that my request was somehow outlandish. Remember, 'the customer is always right' ;-)
<br><br>But with these scripts I think we will get a very good workaround that will reduce workload on the server and give people what they want: easy access to open data. Best of both worlds really. Over and out.<br><br>
Ludwig<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 3/13/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Nick Black</b> <<a href="mailto:nickblack1@gmail.com">nickblack1@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On 3/13/07, Ludwig M Brinckmann <<a href="mailto:ludwigbrinckmann@gmail.com">ludwigbrinckmann@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>> Thank you, thank you, thank you.<br>><br>> While I have not tried it yet, scripts like this will make OSM usable again
<br>> for those who actually want to use the data (wasn't that one of the main<br>> goals?) When - at a recent mapping event - I was told by one of the key OSM<br>> people 'Who wants to download the whole of London?' when I complained that
<br>> the API does not work for this anymore I seriously began to doubt the<br>> project's sanity. And stopped using it -- life is a bit too short.<br><br>The "sanity" of the decision to cap downloads based on the number of
<br>features was that the API was being hammered by large request and<br>consequently was not functioning. The "insanity" would have been to<br>ignore the situation to the point where only those people who happen
<br>to have a script on cron at 4am can download anything, whilst someone<br>trying to do a bit of mapping at lunchtime, can't get the applet<br>download any data because the API is being nailed.<br><br><br><br>><br>
> Two suggestions:<br>> 1) have this script generate the gb/irl data on the server and store it next<br>> to the planet.osm. This will seriously cut down the amount of data have to<br>> download and make it easier to work with up to date data. I assume there
<br>> will be a lot of interest in the UK/IRL/Germany only data.<br>> 2) start a collection of interesting polygons (cities, counties, regions<br>> etc). While it might not make sense producing the cut down data files for
<br>> all these polygons, it will help people get started.<br>><br>> Ludwig<br>><br>><br>> On 3/13/07, Keith Sharp <<a href="mailto:kms@passback.co.uk">kms@passback.co.uk</a>> wrote:<br>> > Hello,
<br>> ><br>> > Following on from last weeks discussion about reducing the size of the<br>> > planet.osm data set for particular use cases I have modified a script<br>> > written by Frederik Ramm that extracted data for Germany so that it
<br>> > extracts data for Great Britain, Ireland, the Channel Islands, the Isles<br>> > of Scilly, St Kilda, Orkney, and Shetland. The polygon I used can be<br>> > seen:<br>> ><br>> >
<a href="http://www.passback.co.uk/maps/gbirl.html">http://www.passback.co.uk/maps/gbirl.html</a><br>> ><br>> > You can download the script from:<br>> ><br>> > <a href="http://www.passback.co.uk/maps/extract-gb-irl.pl">
http://www.passback.co.uk/maps/extract-gb-irl.pl</a><br>> ><br>> > You run the script as follows:<br>> ><br>> > ./extract-gb-irl.pl < planet-070307.osm > gb-irl.osm<br>> ><br>> > On my system a run took just over 5 minutes wall clock time, I have not
<br>> > looked at memory usage in any detail, but it looked about 50MB max<br>> > resident size in top (not the best measure, I know). The uncompressed<br>> > file is reduced from 3.40Gb to 0.22Gb, bzip2 compressed size is 16Mb.
<br>> ><br>> > I have done a little checking of the data and it looks like it is<br>> > working as expected, but I would appreciate if others could check as<br>> > well. Would it be possible to get the script added to the OSM SVN,
<br>> > preferably next to Frederiks script.<br>> ><br>> > A final question, I created the visualisation of the polygon in Google<br>> > Maps because I could not see how to do the same thing using the OSM
<br>> > infrastructure, am I correct in thinking that there is no public API for<br>> > OSM at this stage?<br>> ><br>> > Thanks,<br>> ><br>> > Keith.<br>> ><br>> ><br>> > _______________________________________________
<br>> > dev mailing list<br>> > <a href="mailto:dev@openstreetmap.org">dev@openstreetmap.org</a><br>> ><br>> <a href="http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev">http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev
</a><br>> ><br>><br>><br>> _______________________________________________<br>> dev mailing list<br>> <a href="mailto:dev@openstreetmap.org">dev@openstreetmap.org</a><br>> <a href="http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev">
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev</a><br>><br>><br><br><br>--<br>Nick Black<br>--------------------------------<br><a href="http://www.blacksworld.net">http://www.blacksworld.net</a><br></blockquote>
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