[OSM-talk] does one need to download the planet to use osmosis

[Jon Burgess]

On Sun, 2009-11-15 at 22:04 +0100, Peter Körner wrote:
> 
> > good idea - but can you confirm that it is impossible to extract it
> from the 
> > remote file?
> 
> you could do it with good ol' shell pipes:
> 
> wget http://planet.openstreetmap.org/planet-latest.osm.bz2 -O - |
> bzcat
>    osmosis --read-xml "/dev/stdin" --bounding-box top=49.5138
>    left=10.9351 bottom=49.3866 right=11.201 --write-xml "extract.xml"

Isn't this bbox only a few times larger then what the API will download
in a single call?

IMO you'd be crazy to download nearly 8GB of data just to get hold of
what probably amounts to a few 10's of MB. At the very least you should
start with an extract for something smaller, like a single country.

Using JOSM to selectively download all the pieces to cover your area
seems a much better idea to me. I normally would endorse this if you
were attempting to download something of many degrees in size, but for a
few tenths of a degree you are probably OK.

	Jon