[OSM-talk] Is Xapi working?

[Roland Olbricht]

> is there any other way to get OSM data without going to the main server?
> there are no other caches, right?

There is a whole ecosystem of servers providing OSM data

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm

There are a couple of sources for excerpts or diff files listed on this page.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ROMA
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TRAPI

These two services are optimised for queries to make a map of the data. They 
are intended to be only some minutes behind the main server but don't offer 
all the tags. So you should not use the data for further editing.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/XAPI

This is the well known alternative to the main API. It's also intended to be 
only minutes behind the main server. It has an extended API with still a 
concise syntax. The data is usable for editing. The only tag that is filtered 
out is "created_by" - this tag can safely be ignored.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Server_Side_Script

This one is very recent and still in a state of playground. It is intended to 
serve particular complex queries beyond the scope of XAPI. It also offers 
(almost) the complete functionality of XAPI. It is some hours behind the main 
API. It does not serve data that can be used for editing, in particular it 
does not provide version information. If somebody asks for version number 
support (or other metadata), I'll start to implement that. There has been no 
demand so far.

There may be other storage servers, the category "Data storage" on the wiki is 
not yet written. But at least, there are plenty of alternatives to download 
data from the main server.

Cheers,
Roland