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

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

2009/10/26 Peter Körner <osm-lists at mazdermind.de>:
>> 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.
>
> What you're talking for is a xml/json frontend for a postgis-db. The
> resolving of node coordinates is done by osm2pgsql.

It would make sense to output the geometry part of the data as
GeoJSON, or even WebGL.  What I've done for the wikipedia overlay at
openstreetmap.pl/wp was generate the tiles of OSM data in GeoJSON
instead of .png but otherwise similar to the bitmap tiles.  What
tiling gets you is browser caching of the data.

Cheers