I am pleased to announce an experimental API server serving OSM data.

The server uses a distributed key/value store for storing map data. While the current implementation uses Membase [www.membase.org], the design is not tied to Membase and could be used with other scalable key/value stores.

The design is intended to be easy to scale:
- The data store can be scaled by adding more machine resources, for example, see the Membase web site for more information on how to scale a Membase cluster.
- The "front-end" of the server (the program serving the API) is built using Tornado (www.tornadoweb.org). The "front-end" can be similarly scaled by adding more machine resources.

The server currently supports a subset of the full API; specifically only the read operations are supported. The /map API, and retrieval of individual map elements from the data store is supported.

Get the source at: http://www.github.com/mapquest/mapquest-osm-server

The project's wiki is available at: https://github.com/MapQuest/mapquest-osm-server/wiki.