Hi List,

I am already on the talk list, but this is my first post here. Hope it makes 
some semblance of sense.

Having seen Osmdiff in action, I thought it would be useful to have a mechanism 
to see daily changes to the database over a wider area (e.g. a region or a 
country), and/or without quite so much downloading, processing and hard disk 
space usage* (not that it's not a great tool). This could use either the full 
daily changeset or the changeset filtered by a bounding box. Of course, there 
are currently no facilities to visualise this at the moment, as way nodes are 
not included in the diff file (understandably). So is there some way that 
modified ways could be cross-referenced with an existing Postgis database to 
then enable all changes to be uploaded to a separate Postgis database. I was 
thinking about the steps necessary to achieve this and came up with the 
following.

1) Any added nodes are added to the "Change" Postgis database - should be 
relatively easy as already have location in changeset
2) Any changed nodes are added to the "Change" Postgis database in a similar way
3) Any changed ways query the "Existing" Postgis database and get the list of 
nodes and their locations. The entire way is then added to the "Change" 
database.
4) Deleted nodes/ways - this could also query the database and get the old 
geographic information.
5) The output could then be visualised in Mapnik or similar.

Is there something I haven't thought through, and what are the likely coding 
implications? I can tinker around with Perl, Python and Java, but when it comes 
to a large program like Osmosis I am a little lost to be honest.

For info there was a thread some while back on how it was impossible to filter 
a changeset by bounding box, and what alterations might be necessary to Osmosis 
to allow this to happen:
http://www.nabble.com/Osmosis:-Bounding-polygon-does-not-support-change-data-as-input--td19546267.html

However, I think this is a distinct task.

Cheers

Steve

* Currently using Osmdiff to see a change in a small area involves downloading 
2 planet files of interest, likely to be > 90MB compressed, and then run 
osmosis on both for the area in question, then run osmdiff. Maybe I'm being a 
download-a-phobe as I only have mobile broadband (thanks the crapness of BT and 
the inability of Ofcom to have a competitive fixed line market) but that seems 
like a lot of work to me.


      
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