[OSM-dev] New Ruby lib for handling and exporting OSM data

[Jochen Topf]

Hi!

I wrote a new Ruby library for handling OSM data in several ways. It can
be found at http://osmlib.rubyforge.org/ . There is lots of documentation
there, some examples and Ruby gems which can also be installed as usual
with the 'gem' program.

The library is currently devided into three packages:

OSM Library - Base
    Basic support for OSM objects like Nodes, Ways, Relations and Tags.
    A Stream parser to parse OSM XML files.

OSM Library - Export
    For exporting OSM data into other file formats. Currently KML,
    Shapefiles and CSV are supported, more are planned and should be
    reasonably easy to integrate in the framework. The export is very
    flexible, it uses "rules files" to define which OSM data should be
    exported in which way. The rules files are actually Ruby code which
    makes this easy and flexible. A command line utility program called
    "osmexport" is also provided. Try it out.

    Some examples rules files and exported data can be found at
    http://geo.topf.org/osmlib/index.html

OSM Library - SQLite
    For importing OSM data into SQLite database and exporting it back
    again into .osm files. The idea is that the SQLite database can be
    used for filtering or generally mangling OSM data that doesn't
    completely fit into memory without having to install a real database
    like MySQL or Postgres. Currently this is more of a proof-of-concept,
    especially the export is totally unoptimized, rather slow and
    doesn't work on large files.

The library is released as Public Domain software. It is - as always -
very much work in progress. I encourage everybody to try it, send me bug
reports or feature requests or join the development. You can get the
current version from the Rubyforge Subversion server and there are
mailing lists for OSMLib specific stuff.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298