I never had the opportunity before to try the OSM Xapi and now that I did, I find it really, really cool!

I recently noticed that the Mapnik layer displayed the names of the provinces of the Philippines in low zoom levels and when I panned around, I observed that labels were missing for the newly created provinces like Dinagat Islands and Zamboanga Sibugay and that there was a label for Kalinga-Apayao which has already long been split into Apayao and Kalinga provinces. These labels were being displayed based on place=state nodes imported from the GEONet Names Server.

I had no idea how best to correct this (e.g., verifying that there were indeed missing place=state nodes so that I can add them) so I sent out an email to the talk-ph mailing list. Maning and Mike pointed me to Xapi and after trying it tonight using the following call http://osmxapi.hypercube.telascience.org/api/0.6/node[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place=state][bbox=116,4,128,21] (I was unsuccessful when I tried it before) I was able to download the existing data and edited it to my heart's content in Merkaartor.

This is fun! :-)