[OSM-dev] How is the tile-index implemented/used?

[Daniel Gilbert]

Hi everybody,

My name is Daniel Gilbert, I am 22 years old and I am currently working 
on an offline routing tool for windows. Well, to be honest, I am still 
at the beginning. The idea has grown over weeks and months, and now I am 
somehow stuck. I'm wondering how I can create a tile from the raw data. 
I plan to use the same scheme like Osmrender or Mapnik do (this 
"z/x/y.png" thingy...).

But how do I know which ways or nodes are in the tile 
"15/17192/10659.png"? Well, I took a closer look at the database scheme 
and noticed the "tile" column in the "ways" table. After reading a (er, 
no, THE) German OpenStreetMap - book, I came across this little article 
on the wiki:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quadtile

As one might see, there are lots of  "FIXME"'s and unfortunately no 
information about how the conversion is done at the moment.


Can anyone explain the usage of this field and how the information is 
stored?

Greetings,
Daniel


P.s.: Sorry for my poor english, but I'm not a native speaker. And btw 
this is my first post on a mailinglist, so I'm somehow excited... :)