OpenStreetMap
OSMXAPI is dead or useless recently, apparently a victim of popularity overload.
I needed to grab a whole city in the U.S. to check for braided streets. I've been using OSMXAPI in the past because the main API only allows small areas. But recently OSMXAPI has been overloaded or unresponsive. Even worse, when I have gotten through, it has been giving me error messages that a new restriction mechanism is in place. It has rejected my requests, even when they are ridiculously small (one was only 250kb through the main API).
The osmxapi error message suggested using the planet file instead. This sounded bad, because I did not want to download 4GB just to get a few megabytes of city data. But I found a great set of extract files for the US at
http://downloads.cloudmade.com/north_america/united_states
It looks like they update them weekly. Thanks guys!
I am using Osmosis to pull out my desired city by bounding box. This looks like a good solution.
Discussion
Comment from don martin on 28 July 2008 at 22:23
can't get them to download - just stream to browser
Comment from 80n on 30 July 2008 at 14:23
OSMXAPI is not dead.
There was a server problem for a while - this is now resolved.
There have been some adjustments to the permitted size of the bbox, and for a while they were too strict, eg maximum of 20,000 nodes. The node limit is now 4,000,000. The bbox size limit has also been increased.
This bbox limitation is still BETA so let me know if you have a problem with it. Of course, if you can't read the error message that OSMXAPI was giving you then there is probably little point in me repeating it here :(
Comment from ArtyCarty479831 on 30 July 2008 at 22:01
Glad to hear that osmxapi is now running again, with the server problem resolved.
Using a planet file was a suggestion given in the error message, so I followed it.