[OSM-dev] Release candidate for OSM binary format is in osmosis trunk.

Peter Körner osm-lists at mazdermind.de
Wed Sep 22 14:44:47 BST 2010


Am 22.09.2010 15:23, schrieb Grant Slater:
> I quite like the .osm.bz2 format. I don't see it being kicked off
> http://planet.osm.org anytime soon. Parallel distribution is an
> option.

Yes it hast definitive advantages as a primary data source. The biggest 
one that I can see is, that it is easily readable without any special 
sourcecode.

The bzip2 source is well known and very well distributed. There are 
million of sources on the web and in books where one can get information 
on how to decompress the format.

The XML underneath can be read as plain text and is very readable. Even 
without a full blown xml parser it is possible to parse the information 
out of it.

In contrast the osm protobuf format needs special knowledge about the 
format and special Sourcecode to read it. If the Nuclear Winter comes 
and the internet breaks down, I still can parse the planet.osm.bz2 with 
a book of bip2 source and some hacking but I will have a lot more work 
to do in order to read a planet.osm.pbf.

Also it would be somehow odd to have the planet in pbf and the changes 
in xml..

Peter



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