[osmosis-dev] Osmosis use case

[Walschlager, Gerard]

Hello,

I am new to mapping and I am considering the use of OpenStreetMap for embedding in an application that needs to locate a point on the earth in lat/long coordinate and then display an area around that point using a lat/long bounding box.  I was considering downloading the "planet.osm"  that contains the OSM XML for the entire earth and then extracting a subset of information from that.

My question concerns how to do this.  One option would be to use Osmosis to generate a local database containing the XML from "planet.osm" such that it could be queried in a variety of ways quickly.  However, for my simplistic use case of simply extracting a bounding box worth of XML, would Osmosis perform this operation quick enough such that a user of my application could specify the bounding box, Osmosis would extract that bounding box directly from the "planet.osm" file and then I would feed the extracted output into Mapnik or Osmarender?  Would this be feasible to extract data in this fashion or would it simply be way too slow to consider doing.  Is there any other reasonable way to do something like I need to do without requiring a database?

Thanks,
Gerard




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