[OSM-dev] road data in zoom levels

[Patrik Sjöberg]

Hi!

What would be the best way to get data for ways at a specific zoom  
level? I would like all roads visible on zoom 5 for instance, possibly  
with lower resolution (fewer nodes per way). I'm guessing something  
like http://www.informationfreeway.org/api/0.5/way[highway=*] but the  
API's only seem suitable for quite small boxes.

We're also trying to import the planet file to our own copy of the  
database with osmosis. We have some quite new 8-core Mac Pro's here  
for development but osmosis 0.30 is compiled with java version that  
does not seem to be available on osx yet so we are trying on some old  
server instead. Would osmosis benefit enough from multicores that it  
would be strongly recommended to dedicate a Mac Pro (by booting in  
windows) for the parsing? Do you have any feeling of how long the  
import will take? We experimented with some simple ruby and sqlite and  
calculated the time required to like 3 months ^^


Patrik Sjöberg