[OSM-dev] OSM History Retriever

[Lars Francke]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 15:42, Brett Henderson <brett at bretth.com> wrote:
> I haven't looked at the full history dump to be honest so I'm not in a great
> position to comment, but I'll comment anyway ;-)
>
> I'm curious what the format of the full history dump is.  I'd like to
> understand how nodes, ways and relations are represented in the file but I
> can't do so without downloading the whole thing and decompressing it.

The format is pretty standard .osm XML.
It currently outputs a visible attribute for every object.

Apart from that everything should be standard[1] and modeled after the
tool that writes the planet except that each element may occur
multiple times.
There are only two things to look out for: It is not "pretty-printed",
so everything is just one huge line (I know that some people do
line-based parsing but that won't work here) and as there's old data
mixed in not every element has uid and user attributes.

Let me know if you have any questions or if a format change would help
in any way but I believe the current format is pretty normal and
should be parseable by almost every tool that already parses .osm
files.

Cheers,
Lars

[1] https://bitbucket.org/lfrancke/historydump/src/tip/src/main/java/org/openstreetmap/util/Dumper.java