[OSM-dev] Quick OSM read-only API optimised for rendering

[Nick Whitelegg]

As part of an experiment with WebGL (3D in browser rendering of OSM data) 
I'm planning on doing, I've developed a quick read-only OSM API and data 
format optimised for rendering. The rationale was, that if the front end 
is doing only rendering of OSM data (no editing), the standard OSM XML 
format is not really optimised for this purpose. A better data format for 
rendering would contain only point of interest nodes, with ways 
represented as polylines of points, with no need for the client to look up 
the coordinates of the way's constituent nodes by ID.

This API generates either XML or JSON describing points of interest and 
ways (as polylines) in a given bounding box. You can find more details on 
the blog post:

http://www.free-map.org.uk/wordpress/?p=21

It's fairly quickly put together so might not handle errors gracefully 
just yet.

Nick