[OSM-dev] Massive building import - thoughts

[Igor Brejc]

Frederik Ramm wrote:
> I would imagine some complaints from those users who are not interested 
> in buildings, and for whom 90% of the data they download is useless 
> after the import. You might have to provide filtered extracts for them.
>
>   
I agree with Frederik, although I see a practical problem of trying to 
download data from France (or anywhere else for that matter) using 
OSMXAPI and then ending up downloading gigabytes of data, most of which 
you will throw away afterwards (if you don't need buildings, for example).
I think we should think about providing a more flexible querying scheme 
for OSMXAPI which would allow excluding OSM elements based on tags. 
Currently this is not possible, AFAIK.

One alternative (if this OSMXAPI suggestion turns out to be too much for 
the servers to handle) would be to provide regular planet dumps split 
into small tiles (1x1 degree, for example). Since planet dump files are 
zipped, this would present much smaller chunks of data to download. 
(Software) clients would then have to filter and re-merge data from 
tiles themselves, but that's their problem.

Igor

-- 
http://igorbrejc.net