[OSM-talk] Live Data - all new Data in OSM

[andrzej zaborowski]

2009/5/13 Jonathan Bennett <openstreetmap at jonno.cix.co.uk>:
> Ian Dees wrote:
>>>     I don't think anybody has ever given a use case which requires such
>>>    a stream and can't work with the diffs.
>>
>>
>> I agree, but the point is that minutely-diffs are a minute old. At some
>> point in the future someone will want to see the data in real time as a
>> stream. The only reason I can currently think of is because they don't
>> want to have to deal with downloading the minutely diffs and would
>> rather read a stream of XML messages, applying each one to their
>> database somehow as they came in.
>
> The updates to the database aren't records of real-time, real-world
> events; They're just mappers updating parts of the map. Anything which
> analyses that, rather than the data itself as a whole is just
> navel-gazing. It tells you something about the project, but not the
> world it's mapping.
>
> You're not missing out on anything by having minute-old data.

You might be missing out on a cool visualisation tool though (maybe
what Bernhard is trying doing is similar), but that's the only use
case I can think of right now.

What is a little worrying is that, as far as I see, there's no simple
way to get a copy of the osm data (as in, everything that's in the
database), even a week old -- because the planet file is only a
"projection" of the data on a plane.  AFAIK Wikipedia manages to
provide full database dumps so technically it should also be possible
for OSM as we still (?) have less data and less traffic than WP.

I'd think the streaming/download and upload (merging) of new data are
two separable tasks that can be provided by separate servers with db
replication between them.

Cheers