[osmosis-dev] Osmosis use case

[Peter Körner]

> 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.
I think you'd be better using the /api/0.6/map api-call:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6

 > 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?
To render with the default osm-style you need an postgis database 
imported from a osm xml file, as the stylesheet contains SQL queries. 
But there is a relative young mapnik plugin [1] that directly reads in 
osm-xml files.

Peter


[1] http://trac.mapnik.org/browser/trunk/plugins/input/osm