[OSM-talk] MapQuest release 3 new APIs / tools - XAPI, NPI (new!), Broken Poly tool (new!)

[Antony Pegg]

Hello all,

MapQuest has pushed out three new developer tools for OSM.  Hopefully 
you will find them useful.

Full details are here on the developer blog:
http://devblog.mapquest.com/2011/04/07/xapi-npi-broken_polygons/

but to summarize:

http://open.mapquest.com/xapi
  - A running copy of Ian Dees' JXAPI plus a simple GUI based on Serge's 
UIXAPI - hopefully this will help spread the load and add one more XAPI 
instance to the pool

http://open.mapquestapi.com/npi
  - This is something new. NPI stands for Nominatim Pre-Indexed.  Its 
basically a "minutely mapnik" system for Nominatim.  We dump the 
pre-indexed Nominatim database once a month here - so if you set up your 
own nominatim version, you no longer have to wait for days or weeks 
while your computer crunches through all the indexing.  Then you can 
hookup your nominatim instance to NPI, and get the pre-indexed diffs..so 
once again you dont have the CPU load of doing the indexing, and can 
keep your nominatim instance up to date.  We believe you should now be 
able to run nominatim on a reasonably powerful home-machine or a low end 
server.

http://open.mapquestapi.com/brokenpoly
  - Nominatim has to check for broken polygons when it gets changes from 
OSM, and not ingest them. Twain has made Nominatim output the broken 
polygons to a list with messages as to what was wrong, and links to go 
fix them in the editors (JOSM & P2).  once someone fixes a poly, it 
comes back into Nominatim a few minutes later, and then it gets removed 
from the list.  Hopefully this will help people pinpoint erroneous polys 
and fix them quickly!

Feedback always appreciated, by email or on our forums. Hope these tools 
are useful!

Cheers
Ant (the limey)