[OSM-talk] New OpenStreetMap iPhone Editor - Mapzen POI Collector

[Tom Hughes]

On 07/12/09 14:16, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Nick, Oleg,
>
>      thank you for answering.
>
> I'm quite surprised that you are working directly from the API. Nick writes:
>
>> The server is actually quite responsive for POIs - maybe its because
>> node queries are faster than way queries and because the bboxes are
>> generally very small (equal to a few tiles).
>
> I can imagine that the server is responsive enough if you query for a
> simple POI, or a number of them. But to the best of my knowledge, the
> 0.6 API has no call that lets you retrieve only nodes in a certain bbox.
> So do you initially do a slow "give me everything in this bbox" call and
> simply discard ways and relations?

A call to get only points is certainly something we could add and it 
would certainly save quite a bit of work on the server over the normal 
map call and hence hopefully speed things up.

>> around conflicts though.  An alternative is to speed up the main OSM
>> server - this is good because then everyone in the community benefits
>> (eg Potlatch and other editor users) and mainly because it reduces
>> issues around conflicts.  If we ended up doing a CM XAPI, we'd open up
>> access to anyone who wanted to use it anyway, so other editors and
>> mappers could benefit.
>
> There's surely a lot of potential benefits for the community at large in
> there. I think the OSM admins may already have the idea of replication
> on their radars, where read requests are fulfilled from a different
> server than the writes go to. I don't know if that would be a
> replication on the Postres level or on the application level.

Well TRAPI already exists for the purpose of providing efficient read 
only access to the data for an area.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://www.compton.nu/