[OSM-dev] Need special data extracts

[Tim Teulings]

Hello! 

For a Open Source project idea of mine I need vector data (with a good 
enough resolution to display a country on screen, so no high resolution 
stuff) for
* Continent borders (earth shape)
* Country borders (together with country name)
* Country capitals with position and name
* Big (well known) cities
* Selected POIs 

(a little bit more as you would see on a wall map of the world) 

Searching the web I found natural earth data, which offers most of this, but 
since I would like to use OpenStreetMap data and in fact it in another 
project already used it I would like to get my data from OSM if possible. 
However while it seems like the data is there, I have not yet found a more 
convinient way than downloading a planet.osm and do some (heavy, heavy) 
postprocessing (Postgres, coastline... :-/). As you might image this is more 
than inconvinient (I likely need to by a new hard disk for this and have a 
talk with my provider first ;-)). 

Are there existing exports that already contain above data and are much 
smaller than planet.osm? Is there another (simple) way to get parts of above 
data? 

I do not have a problem with sticking the different information together 
from different sources, I'm also a programmer, I already have a *.osm 
scanner and can postprocess data to further filter out. I can also downstrip 
data to reduce resolution, but planet.osm is just too heavy for this (for 
me). 

I would appreciate any help, hint or link. 

-- 
Gruß...
      Tim.