[OSM-talk] "OSMBabel" - a universal OSM-to-other-formats application

Nick Whitelegg nick at hogweed.org
Tue Sep 26 17:13:12 BST 2006


On Tuesday 26 Sep 2006 16:11, Steve Chilton wrote:
> I was at SoC and heard the requests for data outputs, etc. I am in
> complete ignorance of how the database is structured, but will make the
> following point of principle. At present if I want to get a dataset of
> the motorway coverage of UK I would have to download a huge amount of
> data from web, through JOSM (in stages) and output to a data file with
> all the other "redundant" data still intact and taking filespace
> (correct me if I am wrong). What would be better would be the ability to
> interrogate and filter the data first in order to pull out only the ways
> tagged with specific characteristics (eg tag or combination of tags),
> and perhaps combined with some bounding box or other area delimiting
> tool. Then have the option to either render that output into map-like
> form OR output to other (selectable) format - eg shapefile, AI, xml,
> csv, pdf or whatever. The GPSbabel parallel is a good one to consider -
> multiple inputs and outputs. Web app through GUI would make it much more
> usable than command line approach.
>
> Cheers
> STEVE
>

Steve,

Thanks for your thoughts. Only issue with the web app approach is that it 
wouldn't fit *all* uses. The web app approach would be for those cases where 
a web-based database (probably a local read-only copy of the OSM database) is 
used, such as a web-based map renderer.

If however a user has an .osm file saved locally (could be planet.osm, some 
data downloaded through JOSM, or a theoretical future planet-uk.osm, 
planet-de.osm file, etc) and wished to convert the output, a web app wouldn't 
really be appropriate - hence the option of a command line tool. However it 
could always (optionally) be GUI based - again compare gpsbabel and 
GPSBabelGUI.

Nick




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