[OSM-dev] OSM History Retriever

[Martijn van Exel]

On Jul 21, 2010, at 10:48 AM, Tom Hughes wrote:

> On 21/07/10 09:26, Martijn van Exel wrote:
> 
>> I started this because there seems no direct way to retrieve the full history for a particular area. What I am worried about is that this is an abuse of the API, so please advise if this is the case.
> 
> Well it's certainly going to be rather expensive, so if people use it more than occasionally or start scripting it to scrape larger area then we are clearly going to have a problem.
> 
> Generating extracts from the full history dump would be preferable - not sure what the status of getting that setup is though.
> 
> Tom
> 

For that reason I restricted the bbox size to a maximum of 5km. Of course someone could remove this limitation in the code quite easily. 
I realize that in urban / dense areas even 5km would mean a lot of requests so I want to build in a check once the initial map API request returns (maximum of a few thousand features or something).

The use case for this program for me is being able to retrieve the history for a number of small areas easily, for analysis purposes related to my Crowd Quality research I talked about at SOTM. 

At SOTM I talked to Lars Francke about his history dump script that was run once or twice a few months ago. He said it would definitely be feasible to implement an extent parameter but that would require some significant rewriting effort. I am willing to look into this but it's in Java which is not my weapon of choice.. I would love to have a full history for a few larger areas at some point so it would make sense for me to implement this.

Martijn van Exel +++ m at rtijn.org
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